Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm very happy to have as my guest, Christine Scott.

Christine Scott is the author of three books.

The most recent, now in paperback from Harcert, is a day, a night, another day,

summer. Her novel, Florida, is also available in paperback from Harkert, and her first book

of stories, Nightwork, is published by Donkey Archive Press.

I had heard of Christine Scott, but it wasn't until recently when I heard that she was doing a residency

at the University of California at Irvine, that I read her work, and I was very thrilled and impressed and kind of dazzled by it.

Often I read with music on, but I didn't read when I was reading Christine Scott because the rhythms of the sentences are so impressively marked.

Her cadences are really the cadences of poetry.

And I wanted to start by asking you about that, where you developed or think you developed that ear from?

Well, I love poetry. I read a lot of poetry, and when I'm feeling language impoverished,

that's what I read. Robert Lowell was a very big influence when I was in college,

and I read him every summer, and I read Emily Dickinson, and I read contemporary poets as well,

but that's usually where I go.

And in general, the prose sense seems to be of writers who have an internal balance that is cadenced, Virginia Woolf, for instance.

It seems to me that the prose is part of a tradition of poetic prose.

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