There is nothing more important to our survival, nothing more dignified than learning how to take care of others, how to serve and teach people with kindness and openness. Mothers are experts in these fields. I hope people can learn to listen to them, learn to be like them and acknowledge the wisdom there before it is too late. I hope people can learn how to serve others.

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.

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'll just tell you what I remember because memory is as close as I've gotten to building my own time machine.

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.

The Dark Dark is a far slower project, clearly, and that's a relief. I look for slowness anywhere I can find it.