First of all, I don’t think that a writer who writes about loss (if I do) needs to have suffered loss himself. We can imagine loss. That’s the writer’s job. We empathize, we project, we make much of what might be small experience. Hemingway (as usual, full of wind) said “only write about what you know.” But that can’t mean you should only write about what you yourself have done or experienced. A rule like that pointlessly straps the imagination, confines one’s curiosity, one’s capacity to empathize. After all, a novel (if it chooses) can cause a reader to experience sensation, emotion, to recognize behavior that reader may never have seen before. The writer’ll have to be able to do that, too. Some subjects just cause what Katherine Anne Porter called a “commotion in the mind.” That commotion may or may not be a response to what we actually did on earth.

RICHARD FORD