Whatever artistry may occur within the manuscript, the magic happens for me in the last draft. Whatever I have been resistant to say must finally be said. In the end, I see where my pencil has been leading me.

Style is like voice, it grows organically from the truth of one's own life experience. Not in terms of chapters, per se, but in terms of stories. It is the story itself that creates an inherent structure.

When I'm standing in the middle of the salt flats, where you swear that the pupils of your eyes have turned white because of the searing heat that is rising from the desert, I think of my childhood, I think of my mother, my father, my grandparents; I think of the history that we hold there and it is beautiful to me. But it is both a blessing and a burden to be rooted in place. It's recognizing the pattern of things, almost feeling a place before you even see it. In Southern Utah, on the Colorado plateau where canyon walls rise upward like praying hands, that is a holy place to me.

I think that it's too much to take on the world. It's too much to take on Los Angeles. All I can do is to go back home to the canyon where we live and ask the kinds of questions that can make a difference in our neighborhoods.

When you look at the Pueblo communities along the Rio Grande, when you talk to the Navajo people, the Ute people, and certainly the native peoples of California who still have their communities intact, it is what they have always known: that we are not apart from nature but a part of it.

Hopefully there will come a time when I have no words, when I can honor and hold that kind of stillness that I so need, crave, and desire in the natural world.

I love the interrelatedness of things.