“At the time of writing, I don’t write for my friends or myself, either; I write for it, for the pleasure of it. I believe if I stopped to wonder what So-and-so would think, or what I’d feel like if this were read by a stranger, I would be paralyzed. I care what my friends think, very deeply—and it’s only after they’ve read the finished thing that I really can rest, deep down. But in the writing, I have to just keep going straight through with only the thing in mind and what it dictates.”

Interview with Eudora Welty // The Paris Review

“I should be able to sleep now. And I do, until Labor Day, when I begin to worry and grow melancholy about my final tomato of the summer. Is this my last stuffed tomato, the concluding sandwich? Will the farmers market still have them available next week? In my novel Now You Know, the character Libba, who is dying, sadly realizes that, ‘You can never look back and say, then, that was the last time I rode a bicycle. Or then, that afternoon, was the last time I ever climbed a tree. You can’t pinpoint it. Because you won’t know.’ So it is with summer tomatoes, that fruit Eve most likely handed to Adam. Like childhood, and seasons, and General MacArthur, that most summer of summer foods — the tomato — slips away with scant notice.”

Our Summer Food // Our State Magazine

 

 

“My husband and I have worked hard to keep my mom’s spirit alive for her grandson, who was 18 months old when she died. Despite my own marrow-jolting exploration of the endless wells of grief, with him, we focused on the joy he associated with his grandmother. When he begged to continue our daily routine of calling Nana in the morning on the ride to and from daycare shortly after she died, I played my favorite voice-mails for him. We both were comforted by the familiar lilt of her voice. Modern technology is an amazing thing; it can help you breathe a special kind of life into vapors of memory.”

What do you say when your child asks about death? // The L.A. Times

“It’s a process that moves in fits and starts. I sometimes wake up and head over to the computer and absolutely hate everything I wrote the day before. That phenomenon applies to my book and to the blog. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder what I was thinking when I wrote that. But I’m moving forward. I have sent the first few pages of the book to publishers, and all I have heard back so far are automatically-generated rejections or silence. But I keep writing. And I’ll keep writing until I start to get my confidence back, either by virtue of positive feedback or my own organic awareness that this is the thing I’m supposed to be doing, writing.”

Confidence Lost // from this blog