I recently came across The Largehearted Boy Cross-Media Exchange Program, a forum for musicians and authors to speak to each other. Aside from being an awesome project in its own right, I came across the following exchange between Terese Svoboda and Ben Pollock and Leyla Safai of Heartsrevolution. Reading it made me optimistic about the future of both art forms, so I thought I’d put part of it below. It starts when Ben asked Terese how anyone ever makes heads or tails of Faulkner.
Terese: Like in Bright Star, the new movie about Keats–I’m going to paraphrase this terribly– you’re in the middle of the lake, nobody asks you what the lake is about, you’re in the lake. That’s what poetry or fine writing is like, you don’t have to understand exactly what’s happening. It’s like being surrounded by music. Nobody has to explain music.
Ben: That’s true. In one of your short stories called “Leadership” where you’re talking about a rocket landing in the yard but then the rocket has the characteristics of a dog–what is that all about?
Terese: …It’s just an example of how you can make your own rules when you write. I like to convince the reader that anything’s possible, I just have to write it to make you believe it.
Leyla: That’s kind of like my thing too. I spend most of my time convincing people in the industry about ideas they don’t understand or remember why these ideas might work, trying to sell them almost to the point of selling myself.
