Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, the place to love and be irritated with.

I had a very free childhood and ranged around on my bicycle the way boys do. I had few restrictions.

Hunger steals the memory

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

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.

All through my life I never did believe in human measurement. Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size. I know the grand scheme of the world is beyond our brains to fathom, so I don't try, just let it in.

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.