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OKAY, BACK UP, WE CAN’T LET THIS PASS. YOU LIVED IN A TREE HOUSE?

The tree house is a structure on a friend’s property in North Carolina. When I left my very first job, I retreated to said tree house for several months. Then I went and worked for some friends of mine who are weavers in Italy for several months for the winter. When I came back in the Spring, the friend and I decided we wanted to make the tree house bigger. So I drafted plans for an additional part and we hired a carpenter. For about four months, I worked on building the second part of this tree house, which I then lived in for several years after.

YOU’RE DRAWN TO THE MAKING OF PHYSICAL THINGS.

I’m a builder.

OF BOOKS, OF TREE HOUSES, AND ALSO OF SHOES, RIGHT?

Oh gosh, shoes, yes! As I started getting more and more involved in bookmaking and my work began to be collected, I would see my books go into special collection libraries, put behind glass boxes in exhibitions, and stowed away deep inside buildings, never to be handled again. … Making shoes is a way to take the tools, materials, and processes I know and understand as a bookmaker, and using them in service of making a utilitarian object.

- from an interview with Jennifer Brook, who I nominate to succeed the Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man In The World” guy.
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Keats offers his readers the possibility of entering writing from a side door, the one marked “Apprentices Welcome Here.” For Keats went about his work like an apprentice; he took a kind of MFA of the mind, albeit alone, and for free, in his little house in Hampstead. A suburban, lower- middle-class boy, a few steps removed from the literary scene, he made his own scene out of the books of his library. He never feared influence—he devoured influences. He wanted to learn from them, even at the risk of their voices swamping his own. And the feeling of apprenticeship never left him: you see it in his early experiments in poetic form; in the letters he wrote to friends expressing his fledgling literary ideas; it’s there, famously, in his reading of Chapman’s Homer, and the fear that he might cease to be before his pen had gleaned his teeming brain. The term role model is so odious, but the truth is it’s a very strong writer indeed who gets by without a model kept somewhere in mind. I think of Keats. Keats slogging away, devouring books, plagiarising, impersonating, adapting, struggling, growing, writing many poems that made him blush and then a few that made him proud, learning everything he could from whomever he could find, dead or alive, who might have something useful to teach him.

- Zadie Smith in one of the essays from Changing My Mind. It started as a lecture to writing students at Columbia and seems to have been published in full here.

I’m not even done with this essay, but I keep wanting to stop and post quotes from it. Here. Look at this next one. Look at it and tell me how I’m supposed to resist posting what Smith writes about the moment while writing a novel “when there is nothing in the world except your book, and even as your wife tells you she’s sleeping with your brother her face is a gigantic semi-colon, her arms are parentheses and you are wondering whether rummage is a better verb than rifle.”

UPDATE (several minutes later, still on my first delighted pass through Smith’s essay):

I’m back. I don’t want to be, but I am.

Please just read the essay. If you read it, I’ll be able to resist quoting Smith’s take on “scaffolding” and the need to dismantle it. Maybe you already know about the idea of scaffolding in writing. If so, great. Better than great. The concept is so useful. I learned about it from Chip Scanlan when I was still a reporter. Scanlan’s take on scaffolding is here. Smith’s, again, is here.

Read it. Seriously. Thanks. Bye.