It reminds me of the fact that, you know, children have all kinds of minor talents, a child can suddenly produce a poetic sentence. But there was so much smart, thoughtful responsiveness and often from people who said, ‘I’m not much of a reader but I stumbled on her and this is what she made me feel.’ But this is not writing. Elizabeth Bowen is a hard writer to truck with her syntax is extremely demanding and, because her sentences are so convoluted, many people are put off. They’re usually short reviews.įor instance, I was writing a piece on Elizabeth Bowen some time ago and I looked something up on the internet about one of her books, a piece of information, and I stumbled on a variety of reviews, peoples responses. Then again, there are times when I have to look something up myself and then I will stumble on these thousands of reviews of a book that I was looking for or wanting some more information about, and I’m amazed by how intelligent and thoughtful so many of them are. And it can go on and on and on because they’re not really writing, they’re waiting to figure out what they think themselves. Sometimes a blog is called to my attention and I read it and I think, this person is just free-associating here on the page. I look on it mostly as venting more than anything else. However, even I have become aware of, as you say, this explosion of intensely immediate-I don’t really look upon it as writing-it’s an intensely immediate form of expressiveness through words. I’m not on any of these social media outlets. GORNICK: Well, that’s something even I think about a lot, by which I mean, I’m completely out of the world of the internet. I wonder what effect you think this has had on literary nonfiction, if anything? JONES: I’m just thinking about the explosion of the internet, the development of other arenas for writing, whatever you think of them, blogs, other forms of instant writing. GORNICK: Really? No kidding? That went right by me. JONES: A lot has changed in the world of writing since you published The Situation and The Storyin 2001… Part 3: Modes of Writing and the Art of Structure Part One, “Structure is Everything,” and Part Two, “The Other in Oneself,” ran earlier this week. The interview is divided into three parts. Jones, author of Diving for Pearls: A Thinking Journey with Hannah Arendt, interviewed memoirist Vivian Gornick about The Situation and The Story, her career as an author, and her other works.

On Cats by Doris Lessing