Member Spotlight: David Brown Morris

Why is writing important to you and why do you think it’s an important medium for the world? Writing is not just something I do, as when people talk about philosophers “doing philosophy.” I think of it as a form of life. It gives a shape to my days, my thoughts, my desires. It’s like a secret membership in an informal underground society of other writers.

What are your tried and tested remedies to cure writer’s block? Writing.

What is your favorite time to write? Morning. I am a lark. I start writing when the school bus picks up the kids and I stop writing when the bus drops them off in the afternoon.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received and would like to impart to other writers? Don’t listen to advice from other writers. Just enjoy their conversation.

What excites you most about being a writer in today’s age? Writing is how I enter the world of my own time. I don’t seek to change the world–as if I knew what it should be–but rather just seek to enter it and take my place, whatever that may turn out to be.

David Brown Morris’s Ten Thousand Central Parks: A Climate-Change Parable is out now with Fordham University Press.