Bibliomancy
collects insights and observations about the reading/writing life and
life in the arts generally, words that could aptly describe the reasons
Atelier26 exists.
"I am now as much awash in critical magnanimity as I was bathed two
years ago in insolvent obscurity. The nature of this new status is
extreme pleasure, but also part of it is residual bewilderment at the
causes of the previous condition. I was once deeply resentful at the
rejection of Ironweed — it was rejected thirteen times — but of course I am slowly coming out of that. ... It is the substance of the rejections that is disconcerting; and that
substance is twofold. First: My immediately previous novel, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game,
was not only not a best-seller, it was a worst-seller. Was the book’s
lack of sales the author’s fault? Well, I must have had something to do
with it, but I won’t take full blame. Yet its failure to galvanize the
American imagination in 1978 dogged my future. The line I heard most
frequently was that publishers would rather take the risk on a first
novelist than on a fourth novelist with a bleak track record. I hardly
think this the received wisdom of the ages — to reward the apprentice at
the expense of the journeyman. Literature, I suggest, deserves a
different ordering of values. Scott Fitzgerald’s line that there are no
second acts in American lives was the sad, solipsistic truth about that
wonderful writer’s self-destructive career; but for those who take this
as wisdom it can be a pernicious fallacy."--from William Kennedy's National Book Critics Circle Award acceptance speech, 1984
See also: Robert Louis Stevenson on Constancy, Honor, & Nobility in the Practice of Art
