He who writes is a writer. He who writes, because that is the one thing in life he cannot afford not to do, is a serious writer.
As I many times felt forced to say in the last couple of years, I told Thomas Kennedy that I have been photographing for more than three decades, but do not see myself as a photographer. This prompted him to tell me one of the very first lines his mentor told him many years ago, loosely the words I have began this post with.
Reading some of Kennedy’s biographical notes it is clear that he spent some years writing, before he spoke with the notion of being a writer. I am guessing that many creative minds give birth to many thoughts and to many symbols for their thoughts. They compose these in many and various sequences, they also finish complete works or pieces of what they have dared to put into a final shape, long before they entitle themselves with a term that requires mastery and experience, before calling it by name.
We are writers, we are photographers, we are pianists, singers, surgeons, teachers, inventors, not because we have studied these fields, but because we find our activities in their most deeply rooted form to be the one thing we cannot afford not to do in life.
I find it to be our extended luck that repeatedly many of us find each other in these lounges where the fine life is fostered in its many details.
Thomas E. Kennedy is a writer born in 1944. He is best known for his Copenhagen Quartet, a series of “four independent novels about the souls and seasons, light and jazz and serving houses of the Danish capital”.