Writing Light

Writing On The Dock of The Bay

Once I asked my friend Leonard Gardner to help me figure out how to put a new ribbon in my old Smith & Corona upright. He came downstairs to our dim flat where my typewriter sat on a bright blue table and typed: ‘First we must have light.’ I’ve never forgotten that, and now some thirty years later sitting in a room full of light I think how it works both ways – how we need light to write, and how writing itself provides us with light, how it casts meaning and understanding onto the page and allows us to play with our shadow.