You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this to happen. It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started.

Sometimes grace is a ribbon of mountain air that gets in through the cracks.

I have a very dark sense of humor. I swear. I have a very playful relationship with Jesus.

When I was a kid, our family used to watch 'Bonanza.' I really liked having a Sunday night TV ritual.

How do you begin? The answer is simple: you decide to.

I didn't write about my mother much in the third year after she died. I was still trying to get my argument straight: When her friends or our relatives wondered why I was still so hard on her, I could really lay out the case for what it had been like to be raised by someone who had loathed herself, her husband, even her own name.

Publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is.