This description below, of the connection between Leonard Cohen and Irving Layton, sums up what writing groups have offered me for years. A community of writers. I’m so grateful for all the writers I know, across this country, who speak the same “language” as I do: words.
“The relationship I had with Irving was not personal but it was intimate. We weren’t friends in the sense that we knew or cared about each others’ lives. We did know and care about each others’ lives, but that wasn’t what it was about. That’s a personal relationship. This relationship was the poet talking to the poet about poetry. It was more intimate than a personal relationship could ever be. That kind of intimacy has sustained me my whole life and anything that is not that has always been troublesome.”
Leonard Cohen, in David Layton’s fabulous essay “Irving Layton, Leonard Cohan and Other Recurring Nightmares.” The Penguin Book of Memoir, ed Camilla Gibb, 2011.
