Richard Ford

Richard Ford in yesterday’s Graun:

“Writing doesn’t just come, it requires a lot of furrowing of my brow,” he says, which is one reason he has rarely written about some elements of his life – hunting and fishing, for example – that he would rather just do: “If I wrote about those things, I’d have to be thinking and thinking and thinking.”

He is dyslexic, which he believes may account for his need to concentrate, in his view, particularly hard. “I have to work at making the things that I hear, and also the things that I read, break into my thinking, otherwise they can go right by me in a blur…”

I’m familiar with that blur, it’s reassuring to have it articulated thus….since I assumed a lack of sleep was at the root of it.