My morning begins with trying not to get up before the sun rises. But when I do, it's because my head is too full of words, and I just need to get to my desk and start dumping them into a file. I always wake with sentences pouring into my head.

Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you're a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democrac and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.

That's how it is: some people are content to wait till you ask, while others jump right in with the whole story.

Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week. Large or small, each of those was the lifes work of a real person or family, people who built their lives around a promise and watched it break.

Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least.

I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.

The loudest sound on earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do.