Allow me a banality for a second: Things are rarely what they seem.
While I’m still working on substantial revisions on the novel, I started research for a new project. “Project.” Sparing the details for now, I ran across someone who was too fascinating not to talk to, despite it not being the right time to get myself engrossed in something else. But I followed my instincts and contacted him. And, for a few weeks, we emailed back and forth; me, the writer looking for a story; him, the storyteller relating his life to a writer. Both of us guarded in our own ways, following a straight-line format from which neither of us had intended to deviate. And there was comfort, even an illusion of safety, in each stranger knowing our roles in the exchange.
Then things changed.
In perfect synchronicity, the writer saw a soul in the storyteller beyond a set of interviews to be cobbled into fiction. The storyteller heard a voice beyond the one firing over the questions. Now the “project” over which the writer thought she had control is something else entirely—still a project, certainly, and not a love story, no, but the writer no longer has interest in dictating its course…because she is now part of the narrative.
Perhaps it is because I’m giving so much of myself to you
more than I’ve given almost anyone else Ive ever known
that perhaps I’ll give you more than anyone
MT
