Morning reading: Russell Banks' notebook and the rigors of discipline

Adam listens to author Russell Banks and roots for the notebook.

Russell Banks was interviewed on the 70 Over 70 podcast this week. He spoke about how his writing life has become more solitary as he has grown older.

When you begin, I think most writers, certainly, you have some kind of almost mystical belief in, there is a truth that you know is somehow this process is the only way I can get to it. It's the only way I can penetrate the mystery of being alive is through this process, writing. And you know it's there. It's veiled and it's on the other side of a screen, as it were. But you don't know how to get through that veil and-and gradually you find a way. You map a route in a way into the deepest mysteries of your own and other human beings' existence. At a certain point in life, if you live long enough and you work hard enough and you bend your life to the rigors of that discipline, you manage to penetrate that almost without thinking one day and then you're on the other side. And I think that's sort of what's happened to me over the last decade or so.

Interviewer Max Linsky suggests that Russell Banks has narrowed the gap between himself and where the stories are.

For me, sometimes, that gap is my notebook. Stories can get stuck there and nothing becomes of them. Or ideas can grow into stories there. I wondered if Banks used a notebook and found this interview from five years ago, in which I think he captures the latter.

I keep a little notebook, like most writers do, in my pocket. When I am traveling, I write everything down. The notebook fills very quickly with the names of trees, the weather, an idle conversation with someone in the seat next to me on the bus. It also fills with memories and speculations and remorse and so forth going back in my own life. There is something about casting myself loose that opens me up to where I am, but also to where I am in my own life, as well.