Teaching and writing, really, they support and nourish each other, and they foster good thinking. Because when you show up in the classroom, you may have on the mantle of authority, but in fact, you're just a writer helping other writers think through their problems. Your experience with the problems you've tried to solve comes into play in how you try to teach them to solve their problems.

Trying to talk through and figure out new answers really helps me figure out more about what I'm doing - and what we're all doing.

The development of the plot of the novel leads to a single point, and it's my opinion that the ending that the novel has, which is a somewhat ambiguous ending, is the only logical ending given the structure of the book as a whole.

I think that whether you've just begun writing or whether you've been writing for fifty years - I mean, I'm excited to get there and tell you about it when I do - I think that there's always the challenge of believing in yourself enough to get the work done and not being so taken with yourself that you're unwilling to continue to work on the work.

Tom, my husband, who converted to Judaism when we got married, and as a consequence, we were learning about historical conversions to Judaism. Really, every time it pops up, it's very strange.

Maybe one of the reasons that I don't ever experience myself as having writer's block is I don't feel that I need to be producing every minute of every day.

A lot of people have come up after Brookland and asked, "What happens to her at the end of the novel?" and I will very politely say, well, here are the two possibilities.