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Human language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the while we wish to move the stars to pity.
-- Gustave Flaubert
Roger Shattuck: Still, you’re not a historian. You’re a writer. Was there ever a conversion, a calling?
Mary Lee Settle: In 1945 I came back from the war to work for
Harper’s Bazaar. I sat in editorial meetings with women in big hats while they decided whether to put the Belsen pictures before or after the new French clothes. I think there are few times when the reality that crouches behind daily compromise springs out. It happened to me there. One day in late summer I came back from an expense account lunch at Voisin’s. I wore a Bianca Mosca suit, the regulation large black hat, white gloves. I was 27. On my desk were layouts of Bill Brandt’s photographs of Bronte country and the Modern Library edition of
Wuthering Heights. I began to read the introduction to find captions. I saw that Emily Bronte had already written
Wuthering Heights and was dead by the time she was 28. I could hear the cars passing below on Madison Avenue. I knew then that if I didn’t move I would still be there when I was 40, writing on the fringes of “the arts.” I took off the hat, pushed back the layouts, walked into Carmel Snow’s office and quit before I lost my nerve.
-- New York Times Book Review, October 26, 1980
Here’s what I tell people at writing conferences: Pay attention. Take notes. Give yourself short assignments. Let yourself write shitty first drafts. Ask people for help. You own what happens to you.
-- Anne Lamott
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