The Scent of Imagination

Eric Boyd
6 min readJun 26, 2021
photo by the author ©MMXXI

How many pandemic novels do you think anyone actually finished? I would bet surprisingly few. Once it was clear I wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while — that my job wasn’t reopening anytime soon and everything was shutting down— I knew for sure I’d finish my train hopping novel. It’d be easy. That’s what I thought anyway.

I’ve said before that the hardest part about writing fiction, for me, is that I need to feel…

Eric Boyd

Work in Joyland, Guernica, and The Offing. Winner of a PEN Prison Writing Award. Working on a novel. // linktr.ee/ericboyd