I loved writing for the school newspaper. I liked to report and interview people, but I really liked to write columns, funny columns.

That's where I live, a junkyard in a neighborhood of junkyards. We have three tractors from the 1940s and '50s, several old pickup trucks, and a pile of scrap metal.

I loved writing for the school newspaper. I liked to report and interview people, but I really liked to write columns, funny columns.

I love investigating the natural world, and I find a lot of truths there, truths about survival and beauty - nature continually surprises me (amazing how clever a woodchuck is, amazing how plants roots can break up concrete, amazing how delicious the thimbleberry is!).

The great thing about fiction is that I don't have to settle on an answer to any troubling question, or even a solution. I hope that my stories serve as explorations and help show readers how and why real-life women don't always make the "correct" decisions in the face of economic and sexual troubles. We all screw up, but the women I write about don't have back-up plans or money in the back or resources to fix what they have broken.

I do different work, teaching and running around visiting universities and bookstores, and that prevents me from writing. But it's nice to be wanted as a writer.

Time is never wasted coming to an old man bar.