David Malouf

they felt the writer belonged to and they would suggest and work very strongly to see that what he kept to was what that niche market would buy and I never accepted that at all and I was very very lucky because I had already

written, say in Jono, which was followed immediately by An Imaginary Life, books, novels, as they appeared to be, works of fiction, that were so unlike one another that they were likely to have picked up what any publisher would call a niche market.

so I was free to write anything I wanted and I think that's how it always had once been that you as a writer only discover after three four books what the range of your writing is and therefore what the range of your readership might be and really

Believing that you now have a readership who will go along with you wherever you take them is how you keep writing.

It's a poem about the point at which you lose control of your life in many ways and what action you take about that, how you accept it.

So it's about the arrival

of the angel of death probably and who is no longer either you or any one of the projections of yourself that you had previously used projections of your writing self and it's someone now who's about to take over and it's whether you accept that or reject it and how you do that

Coda.

The better question.

Not when or how, but who.

when the hour arrives precisely on cue, will be there on the doorstep, armed with a name, a face, a family likeness, to claim reunion.

Out of a stack of counterparts or strangers that my writing self conjured up to this or that occasion as a stand-in, then sent packing,

and who now simply appears as if the moment this time around was his and I the shade that must fill it my breath in his mouth my pen in his hand the compact between us finally sealed with no escape clause and on my part

No option but with good grace to stand aside and bid him welcome.

Take care.