I don't set boundaries for myself when I am writing; if I did, I would be paralyzed from the start, unable to write a word on the page.

I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words, to say the words, to touch the source, to be touched, to reveal how vulnerable we are, how transient.

I truly believe that to stay home, to learn the names of things, to realize who we live among . . . then I believe a politics of place emerges where we are deeply accountable to our communities, to our neighborhoods, to our home . . . If we are not rooted deeply in place, making that commitment to dig in and stay put . . . then I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions. Then we enter a place of true desolation.

The birds and I share a natural history. It is a matter of rootedness, of living inside a place for so long that the mind and imagination fuse.

There is no one true church, no one chosen people.

There is an art to writing, and it is not always disclosure. The act itself can be beautiful, revelatory, and private.

Mythmaking is the evolutionary enterprise of translating truths.