Conversations with Calliope

JOE: Good morning Calliope.
CALLIOPE: Good morning Joe. How are you today?
JOE: Humbled.
CALLIOPE: What brings you to this state of awareness?
JOE: My presence last night in the PEN World Voices presentation.
CALLIOPE: Tell me about it.
JOE: Salman Rushdie and Umberto Eco both read from their works and Joanna Scott hosted a conversation with the two writers. Both inspired me to be the best writer I can be and gave me some ideas about how to do it.
CALLIOPE: Excellent. What did you learn?
JOE: More than I would from one author alone. Joanna Scott did an excellent job facilitating a conversation between the two authors.
CALLIOPE: Specifics please.
JOE: Okay, one insight from each author. Eco sees fiction as inviting the reader to think about how we think. We step back from our practical world and look from a distance at ourselves and how we operate. This is similar to what Eckhart Tolle suggests as awareness in A New Earth.
CALLIOPE: And Rushdie?
JOE: One of my favorite insights he shared was that we often get stuck trying to answer the question why when reading. Concentrating in writing on answering the question how leads to the understanding of why.
CALLIOPE: That sounds rather profound. I'll have to think about it for a while. What's up for today?
JOE: I will continue working on editing Marital Property. I am reading the manuscript first for clarity and consistency. After that I will look at it's musical properties, an insight I gained last night. But more about that tomorrow.
(Polar Bears- Peter Langen)