Issue 1: Tom Leonard

A life

There were some who seemed to spend their lives “being a writer”.

And he had spent his life not being a writer.

That way lay safety. An invisibility. A freedom.

Those he met saw him as “that writer” and would never understand that this

was not how he had chosen to see himself.

He accepted their seeing him as “that writer” almost with a kind of irony.

But then he began to accept that he was a writer.

It was a matter of language and consciousness. The link between the two.

He had to choose to accept the responsibility of the outer that he had preserved

from himself, that he had left to the perception of others.

For as he grew older he stood in a separate relationship to himself.

He was able to body himself conceptually as a totality.

And though he had never been a storyteller, he saw that he had been telling a

story all his life.

It became important to him that somebody heard the story, now that he realised

he had been telling it.

Yet all that remained to be told was that he had been telling it.

And all that remained was the need for the last understanding, the sign that

someone had heard the story, and the teller was no longer necessary.