Doris Lessing Speaks (Nobel Prize Acceptance)

Writers are often asked: "How do you write? With a word processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand?"

But the essential question is: "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas - inspiration." If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn. When writers talk to each other, what they discuss is always to do with this imaginative space, this other time. "Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?"

The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

Not Losing Lessing

This morning, I turned the radio to NPR and caught the end of a conversation about Doris Lessing. I could tell they were admiring her, recounting her influence on fiction, feminism, the female sex, and memoir. My stomach fell to the floorboard.

"No, Doris died," I wailed. Suddenly, I was so sorry I had never written or called her. I was certain she was dead. I had just reread her fictional memoir "Memoirs of a Survivor" this spring and had listed it as one of my favorite books. I had also concocted my next novel as a fictional memoir based loosely on Lessing's Yungian narrative trick. So, I lamented the world losing Lessing. I knew they really didn't know or appreciate who she was.

It wasn't until the afternoon that I learned of her true fate--that she had won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Imagine my surprise. I guess it's time for me to write that letter.

Congratulations, Doris Lessing!