What can a writer do? Share the love of writing with others. Send out invitations to fill the head and the heart with the sounds of others. Send out offerings, and invitations to share what was never anyone’s to own. Writers and readers are all foreigners, in places where people seek communities to build, unbuild, and rebuild.
What am I doing, as a writer? It feels like finding a place and letting go. Like introducing myself to you through the voices of others, finding a voice for myself to move you with. Like absorbing the sounds of others in a big inhale, lungs crushed and filled to the limit, bursting to explode, to re-attach, reach out, and re-kindle.
For many years, I was Professor of French and Comparative Criticism at University College London. As an educator and a critic, what I wanted most of all was to explore what relating to art can tell any one of us about relating to other people. I’m forever grateful to students and other educators for the way this exploration led me from French literature into Comparative Literature, and from there into translation, all of it opening myself out to my own writing. I’m now devoting myself to more collaborations, more work with translation, and above all more fascinations with art, more and different writing, more discoveries, and more gift.