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Penelope Lively.
This week at The Paris Review, we’re out in the garden. Read on for Penelope Lively’s Art of Fiction interview, Diane Williams’s short story “Garden Magic,” and Allison Funk’s poem “On Pruning.”
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Penelope Lively, The Art of Fiction No. 241 Issue no. 226 (Fall 2018)
If I hadn’t got a book on the go, I don’t know what I’d be doing. Even during the times I’m not actually writing, I’m going over it in my mind, when I’m gardening or the like, wondering whether I’m getting such-and-such a character right or whether there’s a problem here or there.
Photo: SKsiddhartthan. CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
Garden Magic By Diane Williams Issue no. 230 (Fall 2019)
I am in a room with … I am in a room where decisions are unlikely to be thought out, where I lack strong enough character and vital drive to take my dark thoughts and plant them at the right time like spring bulbs.
1897 illustrated seed catalogue. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
On Pruning By Allison Funk Issue no. 152 (Fall 1999)
Cut it way back. Do not be afraid to pinch the first, the only blossom. The berry cannot thrive in freedom. Have no mercy, gardener. Train the tree to a leader crowned by the uppermost bud. Make ten o’clock your angle for the outstretched limbs of the apple. Prune when the knife is sharp, taking care that the scar be neat. To share the surgeon’s belief in healing, you must trust what has been taken from you is a blessing …
Cut it way back. Do not be afraid to pinch the first, the only blossom. The berry cannot thrive in freedom. Have no mercy,
gardener. Train the tree to a leader crowned by the uppermost bud. Make ten o’clock your angle for the outstretched limbs of the apple. Prune when the knife is sharp, taking care that the scar be neat. To share the surgeon’s belief in healing, you must trust what has been taken from you is a blessing …
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