It's Sarah Tolmie x3 at Strange Horizons this week

This week at Strange Horizons you can (1) read or listen to Sarah Tolmie's "Dancer on the Stairs," one of the tales in Two Travelers (which Aqueduct released earlier this year), (2) read Maureen Kincaid Speller's interview of her, and (2) read Molly Katz's review of Two Travelers. Reading the interview just now, I saw that serendipity had struck again.

Sarah muses:

 It must be pretty clear to anyone who reads my fiction that I am a fan of the slow approach. It is, in fact, the slowness of writing—and of reading, which, while not so slow, is at least repeatable—that is its main strength, in my opinion. If you are writing, or reading, you can actually have time to think. Great things are accomplished by thinking, and we hardly ever get to do it any more. Our culture doesn’t value it. It is quite separate from talking. Reading books can prompt much silent reflection, and writing one is an enormous, extended act of silent reflection, unlike anything else I can think of. It is, as far as I am concerned, the greatest pleasure there is.

Which resonates, for me, with what Andrea Hairston talks about in her recent post. Sarah and Andrea are utterly distinct writers and thinkers (as am I from them), but we all seem to have arrived at the same sense of reading's importance in creating space for thought (which is what, until recently, I thought "mindfulness" actually meant--which now, apparently, it definitely does not).