On my hike my brain was left to wander. That was often maddening because it was tedious and monotonous sometimes, but then my the mind would take over, and that's when I'd start hearing the music in my head or thinking deeply about people I know or things that I didn't even know I remembered anymore. Those thoughts would be there. I wouldn't have had them otherwise.

It's still true that literary works by women, gays, and writers of color are often framed as specific, rather than universal, small rather than big, personal or particular rather than socially significant.

I'm reading George Saunders's story collection, "Tenth of December." He was my mentor at the University of Syracuse. The stories are mind-blowing like everyone says.

If you want to read anything nasty about me, just go to the backpacker websites. There's this kind of elitist branch where they really believe that I had no business going backpacking.

There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course. But I was pretty certain as I sat there that tonight that if it hadn't been for Eddie, I wouldn't have found myself on the PCT. And though it was true that everything I felt for him sat like a boulder in my throat, this realization made the boulder sit ever so much lighter. He hadn't loved me well in the end, but he'd loved me well when it mattered.

Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work.

I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth that it was true, I said it anyway: No one.