Articles

What’s kept me writing is the inability to shake it off, and my continual interest in deconstructing and reconstructing the world on the page. People, motivations for action, control, and the natural world are themes and areas which I habitually return to and pull from, although not always directly.

I love stories. I love hearing them. I love reading them. I love telling them.

Epiphanies come when I am doing something else.

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.