Worlds in Shoeboxes

[[Funny...after posting the photo of a little “world in a shoebox” not an hour earlier today—i heard a piece on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac about Nashville’s favored daughter Ann Patchett, whose birthday is today. if you haven’t read Ann, start with her lovely “Bel Canto”]]

“If i weren’t a novelist, the thing I would most like to do is build dioramas. I was one of those kids who built little worlds in shoeboxes. That’s basically what novel writing is.
You get to build every tree, every person, put them all in place and decide when the sun comes up and goes down. That I can make a living at that is astonishing.”