“Reading, at its best, is about getting inside someone else’s skin. Writing, for me, is about getting further into mine. The novelist Max Frisch said of his own writing: ‘What shocks me is rather the discovery that I have been concealing my life from myself.’ I write for that same discovery
and it requires a sort of soul-spelunking not always readily accessible. Sometimes the way is blocked. When this happens I stop writing, and turn to music. I pick one record, put on headphones, close my eyes, and listen. I do not pause. The fact that this seems radical to some shows how distracted we are—forty-five minutes? Alone? No computer? How frightening. Lately, my choice is John Coltrane’s Crescent, from 1964, the studio record he made just before A Love Supreme. In comparison, I find it a more ruminative record, and darker, more show than tell. It does not come with a prayer, as does A Love Supreme. Not that there’s anything wrong with prayer. In fact, it seems as good a word as any to describe Crescent, which never fails to take me outside of myself, even as I delve deeper, to those quiet, forgotten, foundational places I forget about. Crescent is both guide and pack mule on a long narrow road to the interior.”
—Scott Cheshire, author of High as the Horses’ Bridles (Henry Holt, 2014)
Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan