Articles

The impulse to break silence compels me to the page. I write to interrupt self-imposed silences and the silences of family and culture. This impulse is the most significant impulse in my life, and I write every day.

Years ago it occurred to me that my children could never imagine what my childhood was like, so I began to jot down “one-phrase” recollections of meaningful childhood memories.

Many of my stories and essays are set in small-town Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley. Research informs both fiction and nonfiction. I try to capture the way people here talk, as well as their preoccupations with history, family, race, and religion.

The 1964 New York World’s Fair was a place my sister and I visited with our parents when we were kids and thought the future was going to be as grand as the guide book and fair promised.

My resistance to binary ways of being probably inhabits my work more than anything else.

All my stories begin with a “feeling” (as primitive or vague as that sounds). I cannot quite explain it or express it other than through a narrative act. In a way, it is as if I must build a house, erect some kind of structure to contain that particular feeling, which is like the soul of the story.

When we rented a full-size house, for the first time I had a huge amount of space to cut up stories and lay out all the pieces. I would walk from room to room, rearranging.

Probably, my biggest obsession is an exploration of how all things in the cosmos interact. Animals are a huge part of that, as are the inner lives of plants and animals.

The body frequently appears in my poetry, creative non-fiction, and now my fiction. I think animals are also pretty important to me because they don’t communicate in ways most of us understand.

Politics and the question of justice influences me the most. I’m always examining the histories that led us to the equalities and oppressions that exist today.