The sea, the sea, the sea. It rolled and rolled and called to me. Come in, it said, come in.

I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing was worth reading to people. After that, for some reason, I turned to novels and I've written mainly novels ever since.

Maybe it was the same with people: if you studied them,you'd see new and different things. But would you like what you saw? Did it depend on who was doing the looking?

Then I thought, boy, isn't that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad.

Being a mother is like trying to hold a wolf by the ears,” Gram said. “If you have three or four –or more – chickabiddies, you’re dancing on a hot griddle all the time. You don’t have time to think about anything else. And if you’ve only got one or two, it’s almost harder. You have room left over – empty spaces that you think you’ve got to fill up.

The sea, the sea, the sea. It rolled and rolled and called to me. Come in, it said, come in.

It wasn't that I was stupid ... It was just that there didn't seem to be a lot to say that someone wasn't already saying.