“There was the famous case of the language poet from Red Hook who grew despondent when the Shift key on her MacBook broke. She couldn’t write for weeks. Overcome by melancholy humors, she jumped into the enchanted, glowing waters of the Gowanus Canal, her pockets full of stones. And … she was cured! The metaphors came rushing back. With eccentric spacing between the letters, but still. Now you see people jumping off the Union Street Bridge all the time. They scramble out in a hurry, trying to get home before they forget the first lines of their memoirs. Their hair falls out, but that’s the price you pay for artistic creation.”–Colson Whitehead, NYT