Living life 'like music'

“Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.” – Mary Gaitskill

An American author of essays, short stories and novels, Gaitskill is a Kentucky native who now makes her home in Pennsylvania, teaching at Temple University.  Her writings have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories.                            

                                        Born in 1954, she said she chose to become a writer at age 18 because she was "indignant about things—it was the typical teenage sense of 'things are wrong in the world and I must say something.’”  Her fiction typically is about female characters dealing with their own inner conflicts.  Her most recent novel is 2015’s The Mare.

 “My ambition was to live like music,” she said.  “I had a strong conviction that there was something out there in the world that was wonderful.”

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