As I look out over the top of my screen at the rain falling steadily into the back garden, I’m thinking about the special relationship between writing and rainy weather. If there is an iconic writing scene, it is the writer alternately scribbling and gazing contemplatively out into a wet landscape through the running drops on a windowpane. The wet weather keeps our bodies inside while our minds wander out through scenery made subtle and mysterious by the dimming and diffusion of light, by quivering little reflections, and by the quietness of it all. The sounds of water on the roof and on the windowpane fill those spaces in my mind that otherwise tend to chatter and echo as I settle in to compose a few sentences. The infinite variability of the rain falling, striking and running, which is at the same time continuous and repetitive, inspires in me a particular kind of imaginative freedom. So, yes – an old sweatshirt, a cup of strong coffee, and my cat at my feet on a rainy October afternoon in Portland make for this writer’s heaven.
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