Revision is not the end of the creative process, but a new beginning. It's a chance not just to clean up and edit, but to open up and discover. The energetic prose comes about from all the energy that went into crafting it, I suppose.

I had begun what I thought might be a career in social work. I was married and deeply involved in the anti-war movement. I thought I'd go about saving the world one person at a time. I worked with kids, teenagers mostly, in neighborhood centers, on the streets, and eventually in a drop-in center.

There were the fairy tales my father told to me at bedtime. All the standards. I thought my father invented wolves.

The landscape of childhood shapes us as it shapes the characters in our stories. You never forget the sacred places of your childhood.

We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.

The facts, however, are unimportant in fiction. It's not the events of my life that I mine, but the emotional experiences I've had.

Actually, my first literary heroes were the Romantic poets, so I began to get serious by writing poems. I have notebooks full of them that I cherish but am afraid to look at.