I come to writing from hearing great stories as a child in Louisiana, where the mark of a person was his or her ability to be a raconteur. I also come to writing as a professional actress whose body has been trained to listen and smell and inhabit characters without judgment.

I want to lay up like that, to float unstructured, without ambition or anxiety. I want to inhabit my life like a porch.

It's life. You don't figure it out. You just climb up on the beast and ride.

Don't ever admit you know a thing about cooking or it'll be used against you.

we have to suffer mosquitoes the size of blackbirds.

Maybe people are more like the earth than we know. Maybe they have fault lines that sooner or later are going to split open under pressure.

Flowers heal me. Tulips make me happy. I keep myself surrounded by them as soon as they start coming to the island from Canada, and after that when they come from the fields in La Connor, not far from where I live.