There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.

Writing a short story is a little like walking into a dark room, finding a light and turning it on. The light is the end of the story.

The earliest impetuses for writing, for me, were simply the strange things I happened to notice in my everyday life, stuff I read about in the grocery store tabloids my mom bought, situations that struck me as compelling, anecdotes I'd heard, images, words, metaphors.

There's a lot of effort expended once you begin to completely trash your life. Sometimes, writing feels like this to me.

I always worry that knowing too much about a novel or a story early on in writing will close it down - it feels fatalistic in some way.

Here is the door of my mom's house, well-remembered childhood portal. Here is the yard, and a set of wires that runs from the house to a wooden pole, and some fat birds sitting together on the wires, five of them lined up like beads on an abacus.

I have long admired Caroline Leavitt's probing insight into people, her wit and compassion, her ability to find humor in dark situations, and conversely, her tenderness towards characters.