The condom broke. I know how stupid that sounds. It's the reproductive version of the dog ate my homework.

I decided.. that I could go on being scared forever, that I could keep walking, that I could carry my rage around, hot and heavy in my chest forever. But maybe there was another way. You have everything you need, my mother had told me. And maybe all I needed was the courage to admit that what I needed was someone to lean on.

I get really starstruck and tongue tied when I'm around other writers and the conversation tends not to go well.

...thinking that the world was like an orange, that I could split it open with my thumbnail and find a whole different world, the grown-up world, the secrets beneath the skin.

I was an English major in college, took a ton of creative writing courses, and was a newspaper reporter for 10 years.

Maybe it was inertia -or worse, fear- that was keeping me in the same place.

If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?