I thought how we might have to yell to be heard by Higher Power, but that's not saying it's not there. And that is faith for you. It's belief even when the gods don't deliver.

Hunger steals the memory

[On her and husband Michael Dorris:] We both have title collections. I think a title is like a magnet. It begins to draw these scraps of experience or conversation or memory to it. Eventually, it collects a book.

By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive.

I feel myself becoming less a person than a place, inhabited, a foreign land.

So many things in the world have happened before. But it's like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it's a first... In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see. I felt smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing. I felt stars.

When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished.