Nik Korpon, On Reading

"I read because I write and I write because I read. They’re the same thing, though, so I never do one and I’m always doing another. When the words won’t come into focus, when they remain a nebulous cloud of frustration behind my sinuses, I hide in a book.

I take notes and diagram the structural scaffolding. I grab chunks of beautiful words so that I can steal them away, wedge them into my own work. Then I see a shiny object and forget what I was supposed to steal and the scaffolding implodes and collapses into a pile, the limbs of half-thoughts and shards of inspiration jutting out at grotesque angles. I toss aside the rebar and bricks, slice my fingers on shattered glass and, somewhere in there, lie the words I’ve been searching for. Mangled, ruined, pulsing and oh so lovely. This is how it begins and begins and begins."


{Nik Korpon is from Baltimore, MD. His novel Stay God (Otherworld Publications) will be released in Dec 2010, and his two novellas, Old Ghosts and By The Nails Of The Warpriest, will be forthcoming in 2011. He reviews books for the Outsider Writers Collective, co-hosts the monthly reading series Last Rites, and is a Fiction Editor for Rotten Leaves Magazine. Give him some skin, or danger, or just search and destroy at nikkorpon.com.}