What inspired you to write your first book?
My first book was poetry. It was called Devil at the Crossroads and was published by a very small college press. It came out of a time of personal exploration—I was a single parent, my sons had gone to live with their father for a spell, I was in graduate writing program, and, at forty years of age, alone for the first time in my life. I was finally able to devote myself to learning what I wanted to learn, and that was the study of literature and the writing of poetry and prose.
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Writing can be a difficult job, what inspires you to keep going?
It’s who I am. It’s what I am. Somebody mentioned being afraid of what would happen if they started to write. I am afraid of what will happen if I don’t.
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What are you working on now? What’s next?
I have a new novel finished and in the pipeline, a book of sudden fiction and one of short essays I work on when I don’t have the chunks of time available to me that a longer work requires. I did start a new novel this summer—I had a small grant—and it is my most ambitious project yet, but that’s about all I’m willing to say about it at this time, other than I’ve been doing the research in preparation for writing it for about 6 years now. I’m still researching! I have a stack of books yet to read before I’ll be able to finish composing it.
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What’s your writing process, schedule, or routine?
Writing Space
It’s most of what I think about, and I struggle to make myself do the
other things in life I have to do. I finally started paying someone to clean my house to free up more time. I’m writing this now from a cabin situation in the Rocky Mountain foothills 80 miles from the nearest sizeable town, but I happen to be on break from my university teaching job. Otherwise, I’m never sure what is meant by “writing process.” I sit down and write, and I do it as many hours a week as I can get by with. I ignore lots of other things in life so I can devote the time to writing. I guess I do start out by lighting a candle, sometimes burning sweetgrass or sage. I have certain objects I like to have close by. I have this little thing called a Buddha Board that helps when I need to let the wheels churn a bit.
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Who is your favorite book character of all time? Why?
I read a book when I was a girl of maybe ten or twelve. It was called The Year of the Dream by Jane Collier. It was about a girl my same age whose brother had been killed in an accident or severely injured—can’t remember which. Her parents bought an old boat, a houseboat, and the family restored that boat as a way of dealing with their loss. I’ve never forgotten about that protagonist. She has always stayed with me. No other book has done that to me in quite that way, nor has any other character’s courage so affected me.
But then, there is also Kafka’s Gregor Samsa. I mean how many people do you know who go to bed feeling perfectly well and fine and wake up to find themselves having devolved into a giant beetle?
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What advice would give to aspiring writers?
Aspiring and writer are two words that don’t really make sense when they are joined together. Writers are people who write. There’s no aspiring to it. You’re either doing it or you aren’t.
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What’s your favorite quote?
“Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money.”
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Who would you most like to have a cup of coffee with? (Dead or alive)
Alive? Robert Redford. I love his creative drive and his environmental activism.
Dead? Beryl Markham. She flew her own plane in Africa almost before planes were invented! And she was a much better writer than E. Hemingway, who blurbed her great book West With the Night. By yards.
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What is your biggest pet peeve?
Capitalism. I hate corporations and moneygrubbers.
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Tell us something quirky about you.
I was nearly forty years old before I figured out that the feeling I felt in my gut that I thought was love was actually fear.
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Favorite comfort food?
Almond butter on rice cakes. I know. Quirky.
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Star Wars or Star Trek?
Star Trek. The James T. Kirk version. But the real answer is Firefly.
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Sunrises or Sunsets?
You mean, beginnings or endings? Sunrises, of course.
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