About
Lawrence C. Cobb
The old stories were never finished. They were only set down and left waiting.
The Writer
I write where myth presses against history and neither one gives way.
What holds my attention is old material — mythology, mortality, the records we keep and the ones we quietly invent. Winged hosts. Courteous negotiations with death. Ordinary people who meet something impossible on an ordinary afternoon and are never asked to explain it.
I am interested in the point where invented history begins to feel recorded — where the seam between what happened and what was written closes. That seam is where I set nearly everything.
Nothing arrives in order. A scene can be written years before the chapter that eventually holds it — a death set down long before the life that leads to it, an ending kept in a drawer until the beginning catches up.
The work is assembled the way a mosaic is: fragments collected, turned, re-set, connected slowly. A story almost always widens while it is being written. I have stopped resisting that.
Most of it is written away from a desk — walking, crossing somewhere, at the hour when the light gives out. A book tends to begin as a single image held too long, and refuses to leave until it has been set down.
The name is a pseudonym. There is a clue at the end of every book; those who follow them may eventually understand the name.
The rest is in the books.