I won't walk under scaffolding or under ladders. I wear things like a baseball player wears things that are supposed to have luck. I am superstitious about everything.

When I was small and easily wounded books were my carapace. If I were recalled to my hurts in the middle of a book they somehow mattered less. My corporeal life was slight the dazzling one in my head was what really mattered. Returning to books was coming home.

When I meet people I try to make a joke out of my occupation, explaining that what I do all day is sit alone in a darkened room, flicking through some pages, jumping on a treadmill now and then. I keep my serious work as a writer private, but that doesn't mean it's not serious work - quite the opposite.

I had a series of terrible jobs, whatever would allow me to write for four hours during the day. During that time I wrote three novels - all of which were extraordinarily poor. I decided after that to go and get my MFA.

Even still, we run. We have not reached our average of 57.92 years without knowing that you run through it, and it hurts and you run through it some more, and if it hurts worse, you run through it even more, and when you finish, you will have broken through. In the end, when you are done, and stretching, and your heartbeat slows, and your sweat dries, if you've run through the hard part, you will remember no pain.

I want to be identified as a writer, not a Southern writer, not a woman writer, not a woman from this or that place, but unfortunately it doesn't always happen.

There is part of me that longs to have the back-to-the-earth life - make my own bread, grow my own wheat, just be really self-sufficient - but I am not, at the moment, willing to give up the luxury of modern life, and amazing schools for my kids, and things that I've come to rely on that are parts of society.