Thursday, September 20, 2007

Margaret Forster on Plunging into New Environments

In Margaret Forster’s novel, The Memory Box, London-based Catherine is doing some photographic work in Scotland and she states the benefits of entering into a new environment:

“I felt remarkably content, sitting there, a stranger in a city I did not know. It had come over me before, traveling around on jobs, eating or drinking in a city that was completely new to me, that odd sort of thrill which derives from being anonymous and unconnected. It panics some people, but I love it. It makes me look at the world in an entirely different way and some of my best work has come from plunging myself into new environments like this, especially towns and cities.”

Margaret Forster, The Memory Box (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 206.

Image: “eating or drinking in a city that was completely new to me.”