Q: I thought you quit. I thought last year was your last writers conference.
A: Like Nixon, you mean?
“You won’t have Saunders to kick around anymore.”
Q: Yes.
A: I am writing about outgrowing my insecurities.
To write about it I need to speak about it, and hear what people think.
I get feedback at writers conferences.
It’s useful to me. Like teaching.
We learn from the questions we are asked.
Q: Or not asked.
A: Or not asked.
Finishing 40-Year Run was liberating.
I’m flogging the same dead horse but the tone has changed.
Q: John Cage says, about the expression “free as a bird,” “They are not free. They’re fighting over scraps of food.”
He says this is the theme of all art.
A: Well, it’s certainly a theme, of my art.
But.
I have enough.
Enough is as good as a feast.
I have a feast.
Q: At your age Hemingway was dead.
He killed himself when he could no longer write.
You’re still writing.
A: Yes. I used a quote from Charles Mingus as an epigraph to SEPTEMBER, REMEMBER.
Bird’s not dead, he’s hiding out. And he’ll be back with some new shit that will scare everyone to death