Paul Harding

The silver lining of those years when I was trying to get 'Tinkers' published but couldn't were the years when I had to decide, Why do I want to be a writer? I realized that writing is the thing itself; writing is not a means to publication, writing is not a predicate of publication, so I spent years making art for art's sake.

I do read a lot, and I think in recent years the ratio between the amount of non-fiction and fiction has tipped quite considerably. I did read fiction as a teenager as well, mostly because I was forced to read fiction, of course, to go through high school.