One last important influence I'll mention is Flannery O'Connor. In high school I shoplifted her Complete Stories. Having read "Good Country People" for class, I really just felt a home in her work. I had little guilt about the theft at the time. I sucked in my stomach and shoved the book into my pants. It's very big. I can still feel how it cut into my body in the most exciting way. Clearly, I don't feel guilt-free about this crime anymore - I wouldn't be mentioning here, looking for some absolution if I did.

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.

One night as I girl I spied my grandma and one of her sisters outside, holding hands and singing, "Sprites of the night are we, are we. Singing and dancing joyfully." It was witchy and wonderful because it meant there was power in joy. They were not afraid of the night because they were giggling. I am very interested in finding the surprising boundaries, for instance, where do joy and fear meet?

I would like to give you more of my heart,but there is nothing more I can give you. I gave you everything and you crushed it into bits.

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.

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.

In writing I found a way to make silence and to be silent. The short story has a lot more silence than the novel and that is its success.