Discourse about motherhood is chillingly narrow-minded. It's a tool the patriarchy uses, of course. So people complain about their kids or they complain about the pain of birth or they make motherhood kitschy, Mother's Day-y.

Much of the writing I do about the female body is to remind women, myself included, that they make life and they make death. That strikes me as a far more powerful stance than the weak lies told about mothering.

There's definitely a voice and I always speak my work aloud. I have a lot of old people in my head, most of them dead now, but I always hear how they would say things, my grandparents and my neighbors.

There's a voice when I write. I speak everything aloud. My family is so accustomed to me talking to myself that often times they don't answer me when I am trying to speak to one of them.

The first time I took my daughters to the ocean - and I love the ocean but where we swim is very rough, very New England, rip tide, not messing around ocean - and a thought arrived: I was asking my daughters to slowly recognize death, just dip their toes in its fathomless edge, to know it is there, even in the night when we don't see it and that it, in its mystery and largeness, in its terror, is the thing that makes life precious, magnificent and full of never-ending curiosity.

Film maker Andi Olsen has a wonderful short film called Where the Smiling Ends. She waited at the Trevi Fountain in Rome and filmed the tourists only at the moment after their photos had been snapped, the moment their smiles dissolved. It's genius and heartbreaking. I think about her film when I explore the places the strips malls meet the wild world they are eating up.

I am very bad at remembering the books I've read and so recently I had a wonderful experience. I decided I wanted to teach Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. I hadn't read it in twenty-five years. I was surprised to find how much I drew from that book. Stole from that book, learned from that book about writing. I had forgotten and there it was. Morrison has called that text faulted. I cannot see how.