I have started and stopped working on this book several times. Each time I began writing the introduction to a paper, I looked at it about half way through and said, “This seems awfully arrogant and self-centered. It's all about me, not about Smalltalk. Who wants to read about me?” I gave myself a good old-fashioned Puritan lecture about the virtues of self-effacement, and quit writing.

Recently I got Natalie Goldberg's second book about writing, Wild Mind. Her first book, Writing Down the Bones, was a collection of exercises for freeing the flow of ideas from mind to paper. I was reading Wild Mind sitting on a smooth teak bench in the Rose Garden of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Sydney. The yellowy autumn morning sun was baking the smell out of the roses. I read a comment another author made about the first book: “Why Natalie, this book should be very successful. When you are done with it, you know the author better. That's all a reader really wants, to know the author better. Even if it's a novel, they want to know the author.”

Creaking teak as I sat back. A flutter of wings as the gathered ibis around me took off. I blinked my eyes, hard. If a novel is about getting to know the author, and a book of writing exercises is about getting to know the author, then why shouldn't a book of Smalltalk essays be about getting to know the author?