The wonderful photographer Nancy Crampton just sent me this photo of yours truly and Peter Matthiesen at the National Book Awards ceremony. I think we look a bit like two old Chinese poets briefly returned from exile to meet at some ceremony the emperor's conducting. I've been thinking about Peter's astonishing project in SHADOW COUNTRY -- taking three novels published years ago, revising and condensing them, letting go of literally hundreds of pages. This is one of the more commercially unlikely projects I can think of; I can only imagine a somewhat tentative response from an agent or editor presented with such a prospect: I'm rewriting my three old novels, okay? And it's artistically brave, too, to acknowledge that we seldom really feel done with anything, and to attempt to go back and get it right, or at least make it better.
And look what happened.
