Telling a story of illness, one pulls a thread through a narrow opening flanked on one side by shame and the other by trivia.

We are nature. We are nature seeing nature. The red-winged blackbird flies in us.

Yes we are devilish; that is true we cackle. Yes we are dark like the soil and wild like the animals. And we turn to each other and stare into this darkness. We find it beautiful. We find this darkness irresistible. We cease all hiding.

I think artists can go to a level of vision that can often save us from a situation which seems to have no solution whatsoever.

I love that moment in writing when language falls short. There is something more there. A larger body. Even by the failure of words I begin to detect its dimensions. As I work the prose, shift the verbs, look for new adjectives, a different rhythm, syntax, something new begins to come to the surface.

The hard surface of the stone is impervious to nothing in the end. The heat of the sun leaves evidence of daylight. Each drop of rain changes the form; even the wind and the air itself, invisible to our eyes, etches its presence. … All history is taken in by stones.

Ordinary women attempt to change our bodies to resemble a pornographic ideal. Ordinary women construct a false self and come to hate this self.