Guest Commentary
Don Graham
ON CREATIVITY
I find that money is a great inspirer. If somebody asks me to write on a topic for pay, the inspiration seems to follow pronto. Fiction is another ball game entirely. I've only recently begun to write fiction at all. And it usually comes much more slowly and without the urgency of a deadline. Fiction seems to be in some sense timeless; I mean in the amount of time once can spent on it. As for inspiration, I find myself turning both to Life and to Art, in about equal parts. But I can't seem to write about Life without seeing it through the lens of literature. Example: I recently published a story about a man who sees a famous Texas painting ("Oil Field Girls") and relates a story about one of the women in the painting, who he claims is his first wife. This whole idea came from my interest in Australian literature. In Australia's there's an amazing series of stories, literally responses, to a famous Australian painting called "The Drover's Wife." In sum, I would say this: I'm as much expired by literature as I am by life.
Don Graham