Craft advice today from Ursula K. LeGuin’s pithy No Time to Spare: Art is not a horse race. Literature is not the Olympics. The hell with the Great American Novel. We all have the great novels we need right now—and right now som man or woman is writing a new one we won’t know we needed till we read it.
Amen, beautiful sister-in-the-spirit, Dame Ursula. This also applies to the articles I’ve seen recently about Maneskin being the last rock band. WTF? Plenty of kids in 7th grade right now, somewhere out here on the prairie, or up on the plains, or in the glass-lands of Atlanta, Chicago, and Detroit are picking up guitars and drums and playing in garages. Maneskin is the last rock band? Get out. Great novels, poems, rock bands, and sculpture appear when we need them. Thanks be to Dionysus.