Ask the Author: Ed Davis
Answered Questions (3)
Ed Davis
Craft and technique are important, and it is hard to be successful without them, but if what you are writing doesn't move you in some essential way, then it is unlikely to move others.
Ed Davis
If I had written In All Things forty years ago it would have been an expose, similar to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Like The Jungle, rather than condemn the conditions it details, this story simply presents those conditions in a fictional context and allows the reader to make their own judgments. While the hospital in this story is all but closed, my hope is that readers will come away with a heightened awareness of the many similar, invisible institutions that thrive in our midst, yet that we mostly overlook every day.
Ed Davis
I just finished a novella called In All Things, A Return to the Drooling Ward. In 1914 Jack London immortalized what was then called The Sonoma State Home for the Feeble Minded in his short story, Told in the Drooling Ward. In 1970 the narrator of this story enters that same institution as a seventeen year old trainee. In London’s day the inmates were called droolers, feebs, and eplics. As this story begins the terms that replaced those; moron, imbecile and idiot have only recently been phased out, and the inmates are now called residents. Yet by any name the population of nearly thirty five hundred the narrator finds there are much as they were in London’s time, and the care they receive is not much changed.
About Goodreads Q&A
Ask and answer questions about books!
You can pose questions to the Goodreads community with Reader Q&A, or ask your favorite author a question with Ask the Author.
See Featured Authors Answering Questions
Learn more