Part Two…my Interview with Heidi Jon Schmidt
HJS: “Procrastination is the way of avoiding the suffering involved in seeing that what you write doesn’t live up to what you CAN write.”
Q. Who or what is your “Muse” at the moment?
A. Outer Cape Cod, or my own imaginary (but carefully mapped) world based on Outer Cape Cod. Place has always been terribly important to me. The other pole of my childhood was the thick countryside I lived in, among dairy farms in Connecticut. We were miles from civilization and we were often without a car. I spent hours and hours walking in the woods, the fields, following the brook that ran through that area, just paying attention to every bit of it. I’d try to draw a tree with every leaf exact. It was a deep, deep comfort.
Now I’ve lived out here for 30 years, and this is the place I know best–I’m lucky because it’s inherently a fascinating place. Provincetown has been the wealthiest and the poorest town in Massachusetts over the last two hundred years. There are layers and layers of history here, and in the winter when the tourist life fades away, there’s a community of very different people who live together in an unusually intimate way. I could write a novel about it…oh, wait, I did! Continue reading “Cape Cod, the Outer Banks…My Interview with Heidi Jon Schmidt (part 2)”
