I enjoyed reading everyone’s opinions on yesterday’s post. I’m not a debater, but I’m fascinated so please continue.

My husband and I had a rare day off together with the kids in school. We visited the Mabee-Gerrer Museum in Shawnee, an eclectic collection of art and artifacts donated by a worldly a Catholic monk, who was an artist himself.

I realized something while examining the exhibits: I love seeing the evidence of the artist in the art. The brush strokes, the finger prints, the globs of paint, crooked lines you can only see up close…Those are the things that I love to find. I noticed several years ago that when watching a scene with an actor incidentally reflected in a background mirror, I will watch the mirror instead of the foreground. I feel like the person rather than the actor is revealed in the reflection. The actor is presenting his face, a mask for the scene, and the back side is the real him. Guess that’s weird, but I guess it’s along the same lines of loving an artist’s mistakes. It’s about revealing the person underneath the art.

And the same can be said of writers. All of them, published novelists, wannabes, bloggers…If a piece of writing interests me, I want to know all about the author. Figure out how the particular piece germinated. Don’t you?