Rick DeMarinis

A WRITER’S EDUCATION

I wasn’t raised in a family of book readers.

beautiful, gold-embossed, wonderfully illustrated copy of The Life of Mohammed.

This small and exotic collection of books didn’t make much sense, but it contained an essential message for a young aspiring writer: Don’t expect things to make sense. Expect surprise.

We saw such fiction as extensions of our internal lives

If it doesn’t resonate with something in me, I read with the same reluctance I had when I was fifteen.

Something happens to people destined for a life of writing that has nothing to do with Literature

It happens early in life and is probably the psychological equivalent of scarlet fever. It has to do with pain.

What is the best early training for a writer?” Hemingway said, “An unhappy childhood.” Unhappy children

from physical abuse to psychological abandonment) grow up with the potentially destructive feeling that they have to seize the right to exist.

They have been told in subtle and unsubtle ways that they have no rightful claim on life.