Pencils With Literary Quotes

I've been actively engaged with mythic imagery ever since I picked up that Rackham book, but it really came into focus for me when I moved from London to the country. As I walked the extraordinary landscape of Dartmoor, I looked at the trees and the rocks and the hills and I could see the personality in those forms...then they metamorphosed under my pencil into faeries, goblins and trolls. After Alan and I published "Faeries", he moved on from the subject of faery folklore to illustrate Tolkien and other literary works...while I discovered that my own exploration of Faerieland had only just begun. In the countryside, the old stories seemed to come alive around me; the faeries were a tangible aspect of the landscape, pulses of spirit, emotion, and light. They "insisted" on taking form under my pencil, emerging on the page before me cloaked in archetypal shapes drawn from nature and myth. I'd attracted their attention, you see, and they hadn't finished with me yet.

Haiku are meant to evoke an emotional response from the reader ... to light the spark that triggers creative rumination ... They act as literary manifestations ... visions of nature’s seasonal modulations ... They're emotionally tinged words, barely perceptible sensory flickers ... literary etchings of lucid visions transposed into the minds of its readers ... They're meant to act as sensory catalysts ... like the passing of a penciled baton laid out upon a piece of paper that a reader might grasp for in their mind's eye ... all of which prompts the reader to continue exploring the sensory experience elicited from the writers pen ... This is how the literary sketching of poets are intended to function ... as creative muses with which readers can draw from and viscerally apply to their own artistic idioms ... from that lucid space within their heads ... where their minds eye can spark their own creative visions" Bukusai Ashagawa

I remember the book I was reading. Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector. I remember because there were so many things in Hour of the Star with which I found kinship that I'd brought along a stub of pencil in case I urgently needed to underline.

I remain steady in my belief that well-written literary fiction doesn’t have to be high-brow; it has to embrace ideas about destiny in a storyline that holds the readers’ attention. From his classic presentation at the 200th anniversary writers’ conference of North American Review, the nation’s oldest literary magazine, where he poked fun at his own early novels for their obscurity, implying clarity in the digital age equals salvation. Then he toyed with the digital age itself: Some nut will find a way to blow up the electric grid. All these electronic gadgets that rely on electricity will go dark. The batteries will run down. We’re talking Cormac McCarthy darkness, black on black . . . except for one distant flicker of light. It’s on a beach probably Australia. Survivors will make their way through the dark and find the light from a single candle. Next to the candle will be a lad with a note book scribbling away with the last pencil on earth. He’s writing about what happened. He hopes someone will read what he writes. That’s what writers do. They hope.

As a child, it ’s all I ever thought I’d be. Nothing made me forget the world like reading did. Nothing made me think about the world like reading did. Nothing else flled me up. Nothing else emptied me out. Sentences and paragraphs would drift through my head like clouds. Kipling, Shakespeare, the opening passage of Lolita , G. Isaac’s sentences purloined from Joyce ’s Ulysses   – ‘Bel-luomo rises from the bed of his wife ’s lover’s wife, the kerchiefed housewife is astir’ –  streaked like comets across my reading sky. I waited for ‘crude sunlight on her lemon streets’ (which never came) and mornings that would qualify as ‘rosy- fingered dawn’ (which did). I shuddered at the thought of Leopold Bloom slip- ping a kidney wrapped in paper into his pocket and taking it home for his wife ’s faintly urine- scented breakfast.  It wasn’t all high- minded literature. Lines of purple prose would trip of my tongue in purply moments: ‘The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas . . .’ (Thanks to G. Isaac and Mrs Roy, my early liter-ary education was dominated by white male writers.) One of the foundational practices in Mrs Roy’s school was what she called ‘free writing’. Much before she started her school  –  from the time I could hold a pencil  –  she encouraged me to write what was on my mind. She preserved the notebook