On the typewriter, you tell the truth.
Read Tobias Wolff’s Old School, finally, after years of it being a gift from a friend, and then eventually selling the book and getting it out of the library because it had sold before I’d got round to reading it.
All sorts of thoughts about the book, but first this. If anything, on one level, it says that writers should tell the truth, but none of us do and we all need each other more than we realise. ‘For a writer there is no such thing as an exemplary life.’
But plot events and the moment of having just finished it brought back a memory of my own.
When I was a kid, junior school I think, possibly middle, I submitted a poem to the school’s poetry contest. It was verbatim a poem I’d read in a book in the local library. It turned out it was an incredibly famous poem by an incredibly famous poet, but as a kid, I’d never heard of him, I just liked it. And so, of course, I got caught was was due to be bollocked by the headmaster. Despite no doubt being …
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