Like A Love Affair

ALL MY LIFE I HAVE PUT my faith in books and literature and writing but of late I have begun to wonder whether novels and poetry, with their webs of literary illusions, have actually conspired to ruin me. My psychic dependence on books only became dear when I had a dream about being swept up in a cyclone and the only solid thing I could find to hold on to was a bookshelf Needless to say, it wasn't weighty enough to keep my feet on the ground. It feels as if all those years, and all those books, both written and read, have been leading to this moment; a moment where I sit in judgement of myself and my vocation. Something like a Carmelite nun, who, after fifty years, looks down at her worn hands and her worn habit, and suddenly and irrevocably loses faith. In order to understand how I got here I need to go back to the beginning, to the books that formed me. The book I blame for setting me on the path to becoming a writer is Ivan Southall's To the Wild Sky, a story of children who are travelling in a light plane when the pilot has a heart attack and dies, leaving his young passengers utterly alone, mid-air