Like To the River, my second book will also be liquid in nature. The Trip to Echo Spring is an investigation into the myth of the alcoholic writer, following a small cast of drinkers – F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, Raymond Carver and Frank O'Hara – through their books and lives to find out how drinking and creativity intertwine.

The question of what makes an alcoholic is not an easy one to answer, and there is a multitude of explanations, from oral fixations to genetic predispositions and abnormal chemistry of the brain. Unsurprisingly, the theories writers offer tend to lean more towards the symbolic than the sociological or scientific. Discussing Poe, Baudelaire once commented that alcohol had become a weapon “to kill something inside himself, a worm that would not die.” In his introduction to Recovery, the posthumously published novel of the poet John Berryman, Saul Bellow observed: “Inspiration contained a death threat. He would, as he wrote the things he had waited and prayed for, fall apart. Drink was a stabiliser. It somewhat reduced the fatal intensity.”

All six of the writers I'm studying were deeply preoccupied by the subject of alcohol, and it surfaces repeatedly in their writing, from Berryman's Dream Songs to Fitzgerald's intoxicated and intixicating short stories. The title itself is drawn from Tennessee Williams’ Cat on A Hot Tin Roof, one of the central texts in my investigation. "A little short trip to Echo Spring" is Brick’s way of describing the journey to his beloved liquor cabinet. I want to know what that sort of love for liquor means, what it does to creativity and relationships, and what strange influences it's had upon the body of literature itself.

This project is supported by the MacDowell Colony, the Authors' Foundation and Arts Council England.