by revealing the experiences or ideas that evoked several of her stories. The death of an elderly friend, for example, resulted in a story about Davis’ lifelong project of improving her German, even though her knowledge of German will die with her. When it comes to why she writes, she finds it easier to talk about why she doesn’t write: “I don’t write to convey a message, and I don’t write stories to achieve any particular purpose,” she asserts. Nor does she write for any particular audience, or to move someone. Instead, she writes “for the pleasure of it”: the discovery of material, shaping it, seeing it in print, and sharing it. Admitting that her stories are inspired by “something outside coming in,” she writes “to figure out something I don’t understand.” As she circles around the question of motivation, she turns to other writers: George Sturt, for one, author of the richly detailed The Wheelwright’s Shop\u003B Knut Hamsun for his memoir On Overgrown Paths\u003B and poets John Ashbery, John Clare, Walter Raleigh, and Russell Edson. She considers writers who risk being tedious or strange, such as Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding, Robert Musil, and Walter Benjamin. Finally, she reaches a conclusion: She writes, she says, to relieve herself “of the burdens of strong feelings, by taking them out of myself and putting them in an objective form, a form that can also be shared by others out in the world.”"⭐ 4.6/5(9)
