Now I'm sixty-one... sixty-two, pretty soon. It's a really interesting age. Now we have women of your age, and coming up, and all these fantastic writers, who have managed to have their children but continue with their art, their work. I think women are doing the most interesting writing right now, the most interesting art. I see everything through this lens, of women finally taking their place in the world. Their true place. And it's very, very exciting to me.

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

I am at the bookstore a lot, but let my friends, the professional Birchbark Books staff, handle the day in and day out.

The Internet, which seems now so embedded and personal and crucial to our lives, isn't at all - we really shouldn't think of it that way.

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

There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.

I stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?