School Bus

The school bus is a very powerful image to me. I’m not sure why. I’ll probably keep on recycling it until it no longer has resonance for me. I think that is what poets do. Perhaps less overtly, novelists keep going back to images that retain power for them and recycling them, reusing them in another context, coming at them from another angle to see what they suggest from there. In that sense, I was trying to take what had been a vehicle for death in The Sweet Hereafter and see if it could possibly be a source of life for Bone. It took doing. But as you can see from my collection of toy school buses, it’s still an obsession with me.

-Russell Banks, Paris Review