I am a toggler. I always have three or four projects going, short stories alongside novels and essays. When one project is terrible, there's somewhere else hopeful to look.

I became a writer because I am the youngest of six children. I listen; I observe. I'm camouflaged as a moth. Mothers are unseen. It helps me write.

My father thought a novel was a broken short story. There's something to that. Many of my favorite novels are novellas. The authors of brief things must reckon with the precision of language.

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?

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.

As a writer I feel more like a filter than a performer. I absorb and observe and then I name scatterings of stars into constellations. I don't usually spend time asking whether the stars are random or planned. I make a narrative in the darkness, the area subscribed by an outline of bright points. Sometimes they look like Ursa Minor, and sometimes they just looks like one day the world exploded.

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.