A review by flynxnguyen
A Horse at Night: On Writing by Amina Cain

3.0

Yet, I have never kept a diary. Or I have tried, but it never stuck. Again and again I would begin: with a very short entry, or else with a long one that would come to stand on its own, there in the beginning of a notebook, followed by all of those blank pages. I don't know if, when I wrote essays, I was actually returning to the same space, if somehow I had managed to get back to those empty pages, managed to get back to a pasture of thought. And now that it is done, I am keeping a real diary for the first time in my life, or is it a pasture, mostly because when I can't, or don't have time, to work on my novel, I can still write there. Sometimes I trick myself when writing in my notebook; sometimes I end up working on the novel after all, in those pages. And that is the best reason to return to it, that it brings me closer to something I haven't otherwise been able to get to, or that can't get to me. I want to go further into my writing, into my thinking. "And do I?"