ILLUSTRATION: JACQUI OAKLEY
The author C S Lewis once said: “Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it.” It’s an intriguing idea. What if, rather than being just the mirror — a reflection of the world around us — stories were also the frame? I know what you’re going to say: I’ve hidden in my wardrobe a thousand times too, Lewis, and never seen so much as a kitty, let alone a lion or a witch. I always used to think that mere words can’t possibly create reality. But I changed my mind in Chicago.
The American Writers Museum, which opened here last year, is the first of its kind — a museum dedicated solely to the country’s literary greats. There’s video game poetry, halls filled with extracts from masterpieces and others with messy first drafts, corrections scribbled in. You can add a line to a story created every day by visitors, peer into the mind of a writer to see how the story-crafting process unfolds; there’s even a ‘word waterfall’, which immerses you in a wraparound screen of tumbling prose.