We write about what we don't know about what we know.

Art is too long, and life is too short.

When I was about twenty-one, I published a few poems. Maybe I wrote a couple of stories before, but I really began to write stories in my mid-thirties. My kids were still little, and they were in school and day care, and I had begun to think a lot about wanting to tell some stories and not being able to do it in poetry.

I am very interested in people trying to write because I don't have a big academic background at all.

It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.

It wasn't until I lived in the countryside that I began to understand the life of the countryside and the people in it and trees and water. Just learning about water is an education for a city person.

I'm seventy-five now. I also have the peculiar luck of having a sister and brother who are fourteen and sixteen years older than me. Their health is not good. It couldn't be at that age. But their spirits are. Both my brother and my sister are an example to me.