There was something not quite right about her eagerness, an eerie kind of voyeurism in her need for bad news.

Norah watched him, serious and utterly absorbed in his task, overcome by the simple fact of his existence.

He carried Paul inside and up the stairs. He gave him a drink of water and the orange chewable aspirin he like and sat with him on the bed, holding his hand...This was what he yearned to capture on film: these rare moments where the world seemed unified, coherent, everything contained in a single fleeting image. A spareness that held beauty and hope and motion - a kind of silvery poetry, just as the body was poetry in blood and flesh and bone.

Its impossible to control the reception of your work - the only thing you can control is the experience of writing itself, and the work you create.

Your understanding of a place changes the longer you stay; you discover more, and your own life gets woven into the fabric of the community.

I've been accused of trying too hard to rescue people

Then she had been a fiancee, a young wife, and a mother, and she had discovered that these words were far too small ever to contain the experience.