I live in Cullowhee, North Carolina. That's where I teach, at Western Carolina University. That region is where my family has lived for a long time and that region is my landscape.

What I've become convinced makes a writer are the days you hate it, the days you'd rather stick those pencils in your eyes. Sometimes I almost punish myself - if I'm not going be able to write, I'm not going be able to do anything else. I just sit there and wait.

A small profit is better than a big loss.

A place where something so terrible had happened shouldn't continue to exist in the world

It struck her how eating was a comfort during a hard time because it reminded you that there had been other days, good days, when you’d eaten the same thing. Reminded you there were good days in life, when precious little else did. (268)

But nothing is solid and permanent. Our lives are raised on the shakiest foundations. You don't need to read history books to know that. You only have to know the history of your own life.

Intensely moving but never sentimental, Academy Street is a profound meditation on what Faulkner called 'the human heart in conflict with itself'. In Tess Lohan, Mary Costello has created one of the most fully realized characters in contemporary fiction. What a marvel of a book.