I greatly enjoyed listening to the much celebrated author at the Cyril Byrne event at SMU last evening. I’ve not yet read anything he’s written — a terrible confession I suppose — yet I will in the months ahead. (I can’t right now. When I’m creating my own fictional world for Thomas, Hélène and others, I simply can’t go into any other fictional world. So I’m reading non-fiction at the moment.) Richards read with a completely different voice than the one he speaks with. It was almost mesmerizing at times. The lyrical cadences of the work he read from were strong and striking. I also very much liked to hear him talk of his one meeting with Ernest Buckler, his admiration of Tolstoy and Dostoyevski, his transition from how he wrote when he was in his twenties to how he writes now, and much more. The evening’s host, Alexander MacLeod, was as eloquent as he always is, which rounded off the evening nicely.