Ask the Author: Cath Crowley
Answered Questions (3)
Cath Crowley
Take Three Girls! It's a collaboration with Fiona Wood and Simmone Howell. They're such brilliant writers. I adore the book because there are whole parts of it I didn't write.
Cath Crowley
I can’t pinpoint the exact moment when the idea arrived. The first scene I wrote, discarded in the end, was of Henry’s dad sitting on the veranda. He was writing to Pablo Neruda about love without an address for his letter.
A while after that I opened a copy of A Streetcar Named Desire to see that a stranger had underlined the same phrases that I love. Of course you see this often – but the markings always feel like notes taken in a class, markings directed by a teacher. The underlines on Streetcar felt like a person marking them out of love, or need.
I thought about a whole bookstore where people were allowed to write in books, but that seemed impracticable, and so it became a set of shelves in the store, a letter library: a place where people could write to strangers, to the poets, to people they’d lost.
A while after that I opened a copy of A Streetcar Named Desire to see that a stranger had underlined the same phrases that I love. Of course you see this often – but the markings always feel like notes taken in a class, markings directed by a teacher. The underlines on Streetcar felt like a person marking them out of love, or need.
I thought about a whole bookstore where people were allowed to write in books, but that seemed impracticable, and so it became a set of shelves in the store, a letter library: a place where people could write to strangers, to the poets, to people they’d lost.
Cath Crowley
I read. I read everything I can get my hands on. Fiction, poetry, plays, novels. I read people and places – trying to get back to a place where the world is new and I'm noticing it all. Between books I slip into complacency sometimes. I see a wall, but don't notice the cracks. I listen to a person and don't think about the rhythm of their speech. I forget to notice how I feel when I'm listening to music, forget to notice how I feel when I see the things I love.
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