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Monday, December 15, 2014

Truth: a writer's job

I did an hour live on "Global Griot" yesterday morning. It turns out that sixty minutes is a long time to be live on the radio, especially after getting up at 6:30 a.m. on Sunday and having time for only one cup of tea...

I can't remember the last time I did this sort of thing. Even podcasts are usually streamed later. This was one of those delay-for-seven-seconds-in-case-you-spout-treason things—which, let me tell you, is incredibly disorienting to accidentally hear when you're trying to say something coherent! 

But when I did manage to hang onto my hat, coherence-wise, I talked about truth a lot: how a human being has to know her own truth, and a writer must know the truth of a book; how truth connects to phi, and phi to ammonites. Then how Ammonite is connected to Hild, and Hild to Whitby. And Whitby is connected to my beginnings as both an adult human being and a writer. And writing is about getting to a truth by dismantling the cultural master story, the cliché, by telling the story of a particular person in a specific situation; how I do that, how I slip truth deep into you when you're not looking. Oh, and the idiocies of arm-wrestling in bars before one's brain is fully formed, before one is really a human being...

Go listen. It's only up until December 27th.

This blog has moved. My blog now lives here: http://nicolagriffith.com/blog/

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