I am not alone. Whatever else there was or is, writing is with me.
—Lidia Yuknavitch
One day, it hit me: The best things to happen to me individually were the worst things to happen to my marriage.
And then, this: But the best things remain.
I’d packed my sadness, despite its enormous size. Each day I lugged it down to the beach with my towel and beach chair and sunglasses and paperback and sunblock and water bottle.
The question I keep asking myself as I write this book, the question I keep insisting upon, is this: How can this story—this experience—be useful to anyone other than me? How can I make this material into a tool you can use?
To talk back to myself: experience is instructive. People make connecti…
[...] meanwhile, what would I be doing for work? Reading poems, teaching workshops, going to dinners, giving talks, being interviewed in front of an audience? Maybe for business it sure sounded a lot like pleasure?
Once, while I was at a literary festival in Spokane, my husband called from Ohio:…
