Richard Ford

yeah okay all right

if that's a little bit interesting and you want to not as much of a misogynist the sports writer by richard ford the sports writer is also i think the first one in the trilogy but the second one difference is the second one won the pulitzer prize it's called the independence day and it's literally just so the sports writer i think it's about like a thanksgiving weekend and it's just this guy thinking it's so internal but it's like really well written all right and then in independence they won the pulitzer and it's about him like on a july 4th weekend just take it by his life i mean like he used to be a sports writer and now he's a real estate agent

I'm just like not sure I want to read a lot more about men thinking.

If you want to read anything, I would say skip Bukowski, skip fucking Updike, skip all of the rest of them.

Now, there's one more quote I'm going to use, because this is gonna lead me into my writing.

This is by Richard Ford, who is a novelist I do not know.

He says, "Stories are makeshift things.

They originate in strong, disorderly impulses, proceed in their creation by mischance, distorted understanding, weariness, luck, with the result often being a straining, barely containable object held in fierce and sometimes insufficient control.

But an organizing or explaining system which doesn't illuminate the haphazard in any story's existence can't be a real comprehension." Okay, more on that.

These are helpful quotes to me.

They inspire me, they push me in a different direction, and they affirm me a little bit, especially the one I just read from Richard Ford, because he confesses to the fact that stories and their longer versions of novels- are not written in orderly, planned ways.

I have gone to lots of writers' workshops and conferences, although not nearly as many of some people, and that's for a few reasons, mostly because I'm cheap and those things are expensive.

somebody missed the boat on this one.

The cover art for the Australian version was assembled by Richard Ford at EMI Studios Sydney.

I don't know if that's the name of the artist or if that's the guy at EMI Studios.

Like, this is what we'll do here.

And this will be our 11th year...

And, you know, we've got Richard Ford coming over from America who's going to be with us doing two different things.

We've got Anne Enright coming.

So we've really attracted big names.

And I wanted to look at how he responded to that compassion.

And I'd got this idea for the therapist through reading an interview with Richard Ford who said he'd been reading some books about the Dalai Lama and he wanted to get the Dalai Lama into the novel he was writing.

So he invented a character called Frank and made him a real estate agent and then had him talk to another character.

And so that inspired me to write the character of the therapist.

[laughs]

And like he is, or, or Richard Ford, your favorite novelist.

Like the-

Yeah, right

Ours, not the French theorists or Yeats's.

or Richard Ford's, or the Nazarene's, or the ABC's, or our father's, or our beloved guru's, or anybody else's at all.

And something will always stay hidden.

Something will always refuse to come out into the light.

Six of those a year, win a bunch of awards, get with a sport coat with the patches on my elbows, and the fat expense account like they did in the 80s.

And there's a great book called The Sports Writer by Richard Ford, which is not exactly about sports journalism, but it describes this life Oh, and like how much he got paid by the word?

Good Lord.

The world changed.