1. What is your connection to Somerville?
I moved to Somerville because I got a job at the Somerville Public Library as its Circulation Desk Chief (still the greatest title I have ever held) & the city had a residency requirement. So I moved to Highland Avenue, and later to Charnwood Road, and still later right across from the Davis Square T. Altogether I lived there 9 years (though mostly not working as a librarian).
2. How did or does living in Somerville influence your writing? Or, what does it mean to write from this place?
I think about it all the time. One of my dear friends, Cathy Piantigini, is a Somerville native who started at the library around the same time as me in the children's room, then worked all around the Somerville Libraries and went to library school and is now director of the library system. I feel like I know the most about Somerville through the people I know who have always known it, in all its incarnations. I tried to set a novel in Somerville a while ago, but I couldn't do it justice. In the end I had to make up a city because I couldn't make Somerville obey the rules of fiction.
3. What do other/aspiring Somerville writers need to know?
So much of Somerville has changed since I left about 20 years ago (I live in Texas now) and I don't know which of my old haunts are still there. You can't beat the Parthenon frieze in the reading room of the main public library, though, which persists.
—Elizabeth McCracken
https://elizabethmccracken.com/
コメント