At their best they’re our moral health—and our hope. - Hortense Calisher

I couldn’t write those first stories about them until they were all dead. That’s when I began. (It was an unusual family.) Well, I’d paraphrase Tolstoy: All families are. All people too, probably; all places. That’s in part what sends me to writing stories—to balance out the usual and the unusual in the life I see.

American critics and scholars don’t emendate writers who are women—until we’re well dead. Generally speaking, the pejorative for a woman who writes complexly is “obscure.” A man who is “obscure” however, may well be “profound” and merit interpretation.

out in what I knew damn well was the real world—of literature and everything else—my agony was how to begin. (How do you?) You begin. (What had held you back?) Fear.