Richard LeBlond
Bewildering Stories biography
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In the 1960s, I changed my college major from journalism to English literature because I wanted to be a novelist. It took me 40 years to give up that dream, to admit that I didn’t have the novelist’s imagination. My inspiration comes from observation, and I now sit at the back of the literary bus, writing essays.
Not until after I retired as a field biologist did I find, or become comfortable with, my own writing voice. The epiphany came while I was visiting a friend in Provincetown. She had a catalogue of courses for “Campus Provincetown,” a voluntary, no-cost education effort so typical of that town.
Among the offered courses was one titled “Creating Conditions for Flow,” on overcoming artistic block. The brief description said, “When you are in ‘flow,’ you are highly productive and intensely concentrated on your work — so much so that you may lose all track of time. In flow, your inner critic is silent...”
That last phrase produced the eureka moment. For the first time, I saw my inner critic as the stifling tyrant he was. He remains one of the voices in my head (as a half-decent editor) but is no longer chairman of board.
Copyright © 2019 by Richard LeBlond
