“When I was working on my novel there were two Bolaño novels that I kept returning to—not because their style or content was similar to what I was working on, but because they would get me into a sort of trance. I would be reading and my mind would be drifting, but at just the right frequency for inspiration. Writing feels a lot like the Magic Eye books—where you have to sort of relax and stare into the middle distance so that a 3-D picture will emerge, popping out towards you out of the abstract one. To see the image hidden in the page, you can’t look directly at it or you lose it. You have to be simultaneously alert, receptive, and relaxed to let it come out at you. Before every huge breakthrough or discovery in writing my book, I felt stuck. Not just stuck, hopelessly stuck. Desperate. Days would go by and I would feel this tension building in myself. It was easy to lose hope, but I began to see that if I showed up, waited, and relaxed my gaze, something eventually would emerge for me.”
—Katya Apekina, author of The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish (Two Dollar Radio, 2018)
Photo credit: Sara Finnerty