Peter Carey has a sublime piece, filled with light, about the struggle of writing–when you’re in debt, not only to creditors, but, in a different way, to talents you can only hope to admire from a distance–and the experience of teaching students how to write. He begins with a bit of autobiography about his past:

Writing after work at the kitchen table, I was risking nothing except my sentences. No one knew I was there. There was no one to network with or suck up to. There were not 567 agents and 5,345 editors who imagined, rightly or wrongly, that their lives depended on discovering my unknown self, running me to ground at my Olivetti Lettera 24, breaking me through, publishing me too early, and losing interest when my second book did not fulfill the quirky promise of the first.

(Via the wise and witty Katherine Taylor who’s manning Mark’s post while he is away restauranting or biking or whatever.)

Late last year, historian Papiya Ghosh and her domestic help Malti Devi were murdered in Patna. Please visit the website established in Papiya’s memory, and, if you can, find ways to express support for an investigation that will result in justice. Here is Kumkum Sangari’s tribute to Papiya.