Stephanie Kallos
Ellen Urbani, Stephanie Kallos, Laura Stanfill IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME to any period from before recorded history to yesterday, be safe from harm, be rich, poor or in-between, if appropriate to your choice, actually experience what it was like to live in that time, anywhere at all, meet anyone, if you desire, speak with them, listen to them, be with them. When would you go? Where would you go? Who would you want to meet? And most importantly, why do you think you chose this time? Resistance Sitting down to respond at length to Jon’s question, I found myself less interested in writing a work of fiction related to my reply, than in investigating the reasons why that reply sprang so readily to mind. I think my answer surprised me as much as it surprised Jon. So what follows is a meditation on where creative obsessions come from, and how it might be true that novelists are always – consciously or unconsciously – writing under the influence of that most unreliable of all first-person
