When my sister Louise and I were kids, we could play dress-ups and pretend to be other people all day long. Sometimes this turned into playing “office.” And we never once questioned whether working in the office was fun. It just was. We made it so.
“We need to do everything we can, when writing, to stay in touch with pleasure. With fun. With the passionate engagement that we all manage, as children….At one point I was writing in my family’s hometown in rural Italy and thereby flummoxing my relatives, who had no idea why a healthy man would stay inside the house for hours on end on a sunny day. One afternoon I heard one relative outside my window ask another, ‘Is Jim working or playing?’ And the other said, ‘I don’t know.’ and it’ occurred to me since that that’s an indeterminacy to which I should be aspiring. Because as far as we’re concerned, when we’re doing what we love most, there no longer should be any distinction.” — Jim Shepard, author of six novels and three story collections including Like You’d Understand, Anyway — a 2007 National Book Award Finalist.
Mary Ann de Stefano
