Diane is not the only artist to begin a project by changing perspective to see deeper. So does Jess Walter, the award-winning author who delivered the closing keynote at the Willamette Writers Conference earlier this month.

Prior to the conference, I had the good fortune to interview him for the Willamette Writers blog. He told me that in 1997, he went to Italy and, for the first time, he saw the world through traveller’s eyes. Not only did his trip to Italy spark the creative vision for his book Beautiful Ruins, it changed how he saw his family and his home town of Spokane, Washington. He perceived his family and his home as a traveller might, and he was able to see deeper than he ever had seen before. 

This change of perspective ignited his creative vision for his subsequent stories, including The Cold Millions, a novel inspired by the free speech riots that rocked Spokane in the early 20th century.