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The ruling class is always small, the lower orders large, even in a caste society. The poor always vastly outnumber the rich. The powerful are fewer than those they hold power over. Adult men hold superior status in almost all societies, though they are always outnumbered by women and children. Gov…

[...] the story demanded that I be outdoors while writing it - which was lovely in Oregon in July, but inconvenient in November. Cold knees, wet notebook. And the story came not steadily, but in flights - durations of intense perception, sometimes tranquil and lyrical, sometimes frightening - which…

In a letter in 1926, Woolf said that what you start with, in writing a novel, "is a world. Then, when one has imagined this world, suddenly people come in." First comes the place, the istuation, then the characters arrive with the plot ... But telling the story is a matter of getting the beat - o…

[...] the value of the repetitive locutions that mark divisions in Native American oral narratives. Such locutions often begin a sentence, and if translated appear as something like "So, then ..." or "Now, next it happened ..." or just "And." Often discarded as meaningless, as noise, by translators…

My mother died at eighty-three, of cancer, in pain, her spleen enlarged so that her body was misshapen. Is that the person I see when I think of her? Sometimes. I wish it were not. It is a true image, yet it blurs, it clouds, a truer image. It is one memory among fifty years of memories of my moth…