Here is a special, generous book that will provide companionship and insight for writers and artists of every stripe from the novice to the seasoned practitioner. The Lake Matters is Aram Saroyan’s wide-ranging, open-ended discussion of the literary life as he has known it over a decades-long career during which his books have included Complete Minimal Poems, winner of the 2008 William Carlos Williams Award, Artists in Trouble: New Stories, and 2010’s Door to the River: Essays and Reviews from the 1960s into the Digital Age. The Lake Matters is infused with a literary practitioner’s enduring sense of his vocation, from the nuts and bolts of composition to navigating the marketplace to Saroyan’s rare candor about the inner life of a writer in our complex, changing society.