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Simon Van Booy
When I am home writing, I like to take short breaks with a walk to a bookshop. I read a poem, look
through an artist biography, stare at a photograph and am somehow sent back to my desk with a new log on the fire.
This February, it was almost embarrassing how many times a day I stopped into McNally Jackson bookshop. On
a particularly cold day, in the short story collections, my eye landed on Simon Van Booy's Love Begins In Winter.
Which I devoured as snow fell in one evening. Returning to the bookshop the next day, I bought The Secret Lives of People in Love.
At the check out, the attendant said, "That's a great book. And that guy is about the nicest person you'll ever meet. He brought us
this plant." He pointed back behind the register. "For Christmas."
Simon's short stories struck me as songs. They had a tone, a melody, a rhythm.
They were tiny worlds unto themselves, about free spirits, the lost and the wordless, those among us
with hearts just too large to fit comfortably into the tight channels of the everyday.
When I spoke with Simon, who grew up in Wales, played football in Kentucky, and is a traveler with a hundred
stories, he said he thought of himself as a musician. Words, when spoken aloud, are of course a form of music,
and each of Simon's short stories has an accompanying piece of music which he listens to while writing.
But in the hour or so that we spent talking together and drinking tea, I came to think of him more as a philosopher,
one of the big-hearted, free-spirited from his stories. We spoke of his daughter as he shuddered to think of his work
before her, about intimacy and inner life being the source of everything good, about virtue, and about how much he loved
his new character Amelia who is blind and just had a birthday. At one point, he turned to me and said,
"You see, words are so useless, aren't they? They can only point to the meaning."
As a writer with a love for words, I can't tell you how relieved I was to hear him say this.
That's right. Words are utterly useless. It is only the meaning we find within that gives them their strange strength and depth.
We walk through the snow pointing at that large, shifting, transient thing which we stumble over. Look. Look. Look.
There it is. Listen closely, and I will tell it to you as closely as I can. This is how I picture Simon.
Simon's first novel, Everything Beautiful Began After is released this month. For god's sake, he bought the bookstore a plant. Read it. For a hundred reasons.
For more about Simon, his books and writing workshops: simonvanbooy.com
Simon's wonderful short story song books.
Simon and his daughter Madelaine
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