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2014-11-06 - 10:59 a.m.

If I'm being honest, there's a little small part of me that wanted to be a writer because of what I thought being a writer was like. I'm talking really about fantasies here, one of those times when you picture what, you know, Barcelona will be like or what being married will be like or what, in my case, being a writer-type will be like.

For me, it was just a couple of images. Blame it on a certain handful of movies. For sure Wonder Boys had something to do with it. And others that I can't name right now, the specifics having vanished like meals from 20 years ago. The first is, and I don't know why, basically this: Me in a black wool pea coat, collar turned up against the November wind, dried and crackling leaves swirling about, and it's night, and I'm leaving a library, and maybe it's on a college campus, and I've either just finished reading something dusty and brilliant or I've just given a reading to 40 people who laughed and nodded along and who thought I was great. It's really about pushing open the door, gathering up that collar, and walking ahead into that cold wind where nothing can touch me and where I'm doing what I want to do.

The other is much more difficult to get at. It starts with, can you believe it, middle-school grammar workbooks. I'd always read a lot as a kid--not books so much as the newspaper and magazines--and so the grammar stuff came much more easily to me than it did to most of the kids around me. But it was in those examples that I would get lost. The sentence would be something like: "We/Us students walked into Mr. Johnson's corner grocery store." Maybe it was because the books had obviously been composed in the 1960s or 70s and that the cultural references were just slightly off or outdated or weirdly idealized (corner grocery store in the suburban 1980s?) but they always transported me to some sort of American village that probably never existed. In this village it was clean, but lived-in. It was safe, but there were interesting stores and theaters and corners where you could (benevolently or otherwise) nose around. And there were pea coats and blowing leaves and books and I guess what I'm saying is that in this made-up place is where I've always secretly wanted to live. Because, I guess, it felt like some kind of wind-blown perfection where I would finally feel at home.

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