Will > Books: coming-of-age‎ (15)

Falling into friendship, with Edith was also, for Lacey, inextricable, with falling in love with the northern summer. Never had she woken to birds

Falling into friendship, with Edith was also, for Lacey, inextricable, with falling in love with the northern summer. Never had she woken to birdsong, or plunged headfirst into cool water on a blazing day, or listened to the whispers of the oaks as a thunderstorm, swept in. Never had the sun felt so warm and golden, or rain soaked her so completely. The shrill of crickets, alarming at first, began to soothe her to sleep at night. A toad hunched by a log was so intensely ugly she cried out in shock, while a fox, slipping through the pines, looked like the tip of a paintbrush dipped in orange. Her hands and legs became tan and useful. She could tie three kinds of sailor knots, and she could kick her way up a river current. Her face in the spotty cabin mirror was freckled, it also looked rounder and full. She was gaining weight back, and when one night Edith observed, “You’re not coughing anymore,” Lacey realized it was true.

I was interested in creating a novel that had an allegorical Western feel. The stranger comes back to this city for the first time in forty-four years; “the stranger comes to town.” That’s the beginning of the classic Western, and Westerns play an important role throughout the story, as both subject and backdrop, especially in regard to gender. Because in the classic Western, the “stranger” is male, right? But here, it’s Edith, an old woman in a wrinkled skirt and sneaker boots. - from The Rumpus interview

[This] combined with a book that I read that came out in American translation in 2001 called Embers …originally published in 1942, is a story about two old friends, males, an old general and a soldier, meeting in a castle in the Carpathians for the first time in forty years. They're also weighing out friendship. When I read that book, I thought, this is such a great treatise on friendship, but it's about male friendship. Female friendship is different. Wouldn't it be great to use this structure but set it in an American castle? There it is. Then the third piece was, as we all experienced, we lived like recluses, particularly for me, the academic year that was 2020/'21. I thought, I know how to write this character now, this person who's basically a hermit who lives in the hotel and never goes out and is locked in her tower. - from the Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books interview

Maria Hummel is a novelist and poet. Her books include Goldenseal, Lesson in Red, a follow-up to Still Lives, a Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine pick, a Book of the Month Club pick, and BBC Culture Best Book of 2018; Motherland, a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year; and House and Fire, winner of the APR/Honickman Poetry Prize… Hummel worked for many years as an arts editor and journalist, and as a writer/editor for The Museum of Contemporary Art, experience that informed Still Lives and Lesson in Red. She also taught creative writing at Stanford University and Colorado College, and is now a full professor at the University of Vermont. She lives in Vermont with her husband and sons.

Interviews
-----The Mark Twain House & Museum Program - GOLDENSEAL with Maria Hummerl and Barbara Bourland by Omar Savedo – Video – 58:15
-----Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books - Maria Hummel, Goldenseal by Zibby Owens
-----The Rumpus Friendship Sunset: A Conversation with Maria Hummel by Jenny Bartoy

Items of Interest from the author
-----Reading Group Guide
-----LitHub - The Shadow Self of Domestic Stories: A Reading List of Novels Set in Hotels

In the next town over, a man had killed his family. He’d nailed the doors shut so they couldn’t get out; the neighbours heard them running through

In the next town over, a man had killed his family. He’d nailed the doors shut so they couldn’t get out; the neighbours heard them running through the rooms, screaming for mercy. When he had finished he turned the gun on himself.
Everyone was talking about it – about what kind of man could do such a thing, about the secrets he must have had. Rumours swirled about affairs, addiction, hidden files on his computer.
Elaine just said she was surprised it didn’t happen more often.

For months now she has been having the same dream Of a flood that sweeps through the house Carries off clothes from the wardrobes Toys from the cupboards Food from the table In the dream she is trying to stop it She is wading around, pulling things out of the water But there’s too much to hold in her arms and it overcomes her The current grows stronger Pulls away the appliances the kitchen island tiles from the floor paint from the at the edge of the water watching her go Staring down as she’s swept past In their eyes she is old Her youth is gone too It has all been washed away by the water

You couldn’t protect the people you loved – that was the lesson of history, and it struck him therefore that to love someone meant to be opened up to a radically heightened level of suffering. He said I love you to his wife and it felt like a curse, an invitation to Fate to swerve a fuel truck head-on into her, to send a stray spark shooting from the fireplace to her dressing gown. He saw her screaming, her poor terrified face beneath his, as she writhed in flames on the living-room carpet. And the child too! Though she hadn’t yet been born, she was there too. All night he listened to her scream in his head – he couldn’t sleep from it, he just lay there and sobbed, because he knew he couldn’t protect her, couldn’t protect her enough…

When Dad was fun everything was fun. Not just holidays, not just Christmas. Going to the supermarket! Cutting the grass! At bedtime they had pyjama races, they read Lord of the Rings cover to cover, they put a torch under their chins and told each other ghost stories…

Some people might say that the key problem is with coming back from the dead specifically. Because obviously death is a pretty serious step with all kinds of long-term effects that you’re not going to just shake off. But lately you’ve noticed it with other things too, that even though they never actually died, when they came back from where they’d gone they were still completely changed.

…is it worth taking the risk? Sometimes? If you could still sort of see the person they were and you thought maybe there was still enough time, if you knew what to do or say?

…the pesticide the farmers use on plants contains a neuro-toxin that destroys their memory so they forget their way home, can’t make it back to the hive where they live, and that’s why they’re dying out. When they looked in the hives they found them not full of dead bees, but mysteriously empty. Maybe that’s what happened to Cass, you think. Maybe air pollution in the city has damaged her brain and now she’s forgotten her home. Though really you know it started way before she came here.

I wrote Imelda’s section, and I knew she was on her way to this dinner… I wrote that first line like she, well, she needs to use the bathroom really urgently. And I put commas in and a full stop. And it did not feel right at all. The only way to write it was without the punctuation, and I wanted it to feel like you’re in her head. She doesn’t parse things in the same educated way that Dickie or indeed the kids would do. She just thinks in this much more immediate, intensive way. When you go from the kids’ sections into Imelda’s section, I wanted it to feel like, woah, there’s a change in gear here. Like there’s something’s going on that hasn’t been apparent up until now. At this moment in her life, but maybe at every point in her life, everything feels extremely precarious. She’s on this knife edge, all the time. She always feels like everything’s going to collapse, the floor is going to disappear from under her and she’s going to just tumble down into the past with her abusive dad and the poverty and the grimness and stuff. - from the. Hindustani Times interview

Nature in her eyes was almost as bad as sports. The way it kept growing? The way things, like crops or whatever, would die and then next year they came back? Did no one else get how creepy that was?

or

Behind him, another boy, not as tall but slightly droopier, had started kissing Elaine. It was distracting; it seemed like she could hear it even over the metal, a squelching noise like walking on frogspawn.

or

It feels weird reading a prayer off his phone, where he has looked at so many unreligious things. He hopes the Virgin Mary knows it’s meant for her, that he’s not praying to e.g. Candy Crush or Pornhub.

Ireland is a place where people are very good at talking. People are so funny and have such brilliant stories, and it’s a way to disguise what you’re actually feeling. The reason, I think, is because this is a place where very terrible things have happened and the way we deal with them is by not addressing them. So I feel like the ghosts are alive and they’re active. The past is affecting what you’re doing in a very real way. And if you don’t address the issues, then the darkness just grows, and the damage gets passed down from one generation to the next, like in the book. – from the Guardian interview

…it’s hard to remember sometimes that no one is only who they appear to be at the moment. It’s hard to remember sometimes all that goes into a life

…it’s hard to remember sometimes that no one is only who they appear to be at the moment. It’s hard to remember sometimes all that goes into a life, all the different versions of a person, throughout the years, all the ways in which people are capable of changing.

…sometimes he is utterly exhausted by being an adult, by being someone, expected to explain the world to younger people, as if he’s in possession of the right answers.

I was very interested in showing people who are all different from one another, so I sat down and brainstormed a bunch of different people, who might be working at the mall or go to the mall. I wanted these people to be those whose lives would not otherwise intersect with one another. I also thought about conflict and tension; I have these characters who are extremely set in their ways and believe one thing so strongly. When you put them in scenes with each other, you can see what might happen. It’s also about questioning: are they going to stay static, or is there room for growth? If there is room, how much would feel realistic? With the multiple narrators, I enjoyed being able to get into each of their perspectives. A character might seem a certain way and be really frustrating in one chapter, when viewed through someone else’s thought process. In a later chapter, you might get their own thought process—they might still be frustrating, but you could at least understand why they believe the things that they believe. - from the Electric Lit interview

I wanted there to be ten chapters in the span of ten months, leading up to the mall’s closing. While writing these stories, I was thinking a lot about Olive Kitteridge and Olive Again, by Elizabeth Strout, and how those circled around a particular place, which was a small town in Maine.

“People who often get the most attention are the loudest, but people who are the quietest often have a lot going on inside. I wanted to explore that in this book. Many of the characters I write about are isolated and lonely. Many are not living the lives they had once wished for. As a writer I can explore the interiors of these people. I can go into their minds and show what they’re thinking and how they’re feeling.” - from the Times-Union interview

I had my first sabbatical during the 2018-19 school year, and that’s when I wrote the first draft of my novel. I tricked myself by saying, ‘It’s not a novel. It’s a series of linked stories.’ - from the Times Union interview

I can’t take credit for it; my agent came up with it. My original title was Those Days at the Mall, which is a character’s line in the very last chapter. Obviously, the mall map says “You Are Here.” But it’s also so much about place and where people spend their time. So, the question behind the title was thinking about where we spend our days. -from the Electric Lit interview

She stares at her son, willing him to look at her and tell her about the magic tricks he’s been practicing. She wants him to invite her to his school talent show. She wants him to tell her about the videos he’s been watching. But he just keeps reading. Tina looks down at the desk, sees her sketch of the goose, peeking out from under some menus. Jackson shuffled around, and she grabs the sketch, balls it up, and drops it into the garbage can finish the desk. As the crumpled paper falls from her hand, she thinks it’s not just that Jackson is hiding something from her; it’s that he is imitating her. He’s keeping secret something that’s important to him, maybe because he’s afraid he’s no good or it’s silly or she’d be disappointed to know he cares about such a thing. She feels certain he has learned to be quiet and secretive, and to not allow himself to talk about impractical dreams from her.

Karin Lin-Greenberg is an American fiction writer. Her story collection, Faulty Predictions (University of Georgia Press, 2014), won the 2013 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction[1] and the 2014 Foreword Review INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award (Gold Winner for Short Stories).[2] Her stories have appeared in The Antioch Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Epoch, Kenyon Review Online, New Ohio Review, The North American Review, and Redivider. She is currently an associate professor of English at Siena College in Loudonville, New York. She has previously taught at Missouri State University, The College of Wooster, and Appalachian State University. She earned an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Pittsburghin 2006, an MA in Literature and Writing from Temple University in 2003, and a BA in English from Bryn Mawr College.

The sea whispers, faint. It sounds like pages shuffling. A seal barks. I lick a finger and test the breeze. The wind is in the east. A moment late

The sea whispers, faint. It sounds like pages shuffling. A seal barks. I lick a finger and test the breeze. The wind is in the east. A moment later it comes, mournful and high. The stones are singing and I feel it, at last, that I’m home. I listen for a time, despite my tiredness. I think, if heartbreak had a sound, it would be just like this.

She can smell him the way wild animals smell prey.

The visions don’t frighten me anymore. I can usually tell what’s real and what isn’t.

The leaves of the sugar maple whisper—under it, there’s a high-pitched whine, a long shrill note like bad singing…it sounds like all the things you’re not supposed to believe in—mermaids, selkies, sirens…’What’s that sound?’ It seems like it’s coming from inside of me, somehow. Dad pauses in the act of unlocking the door. ‘It’s the stones on the beach. High tide has eaten away at them, making little holes—kind of like finger stops on a flute—and when the wind is in the east, coming over the ocean, it whistles through.’

Sometimes her mother talks to Pearl in the night. She learns to keep herself awake, so she can hear her. It always happens the same way. Rebecca’s coming. It starts with the sound of the wind roaring in Pearl’s head, just like that day on the mountain. And then Rebecca’s warm hands close over her cold ears.

I suffer from hypnagogic hallucinations. They started when I was about 13, taking the form of a hand in the small of my back as I was falling asleep, shoving me out of bed really hard. I knew there was someone in the room and I knew they didn’t mean me well. With the information I had at the time – pre-Google as well – there was no other explanation for it, was there? I think it’s probably the deepest chasm I have ever looked into. There’s nothing comparable to it in the daylight world. - from the 9/26/22 Guardian interview

Writers are monsters, really. We eat everything we see.

The book is a mirror and I am stepping through the looking glass.

‘Writing is power,’ she says. ‘Big magic. It’s a way of keeping someone alive forever.’

I think about our three names, us kids, as we were. ‘Wilder,’ I whisper to myself sometimes. ‘Nathaniel, Harper.’ We’re all named after writers. It’s too much of a coincidence. Harper. Wilder. Harlow. The names chime together. The kind of thing that would never happen in real life but it might happen in a book.

‘You wanted to live forever,’ Harper says gently. ‘You both did, you and Wilder. That’s all writers really want, whatever they say.

I wake to the sound of breath. No hand caressing me, this time. Instead I have the sense that I am being pummeled and stretched, pulled by firm hands into agonizing, geometrical shapes. I scream but no voice comes from my throat. Instead, an infernal scratching—horrible, like rats’ claws on stone, like bone grinding, like the creak of a bough before it breaks. Or like a pen scratching on paper.

The spirit of a chief, you see, is a powerful thing. The skull became a head again when it was lifted from the grave . . . resurrected.”
“Resurrect

The spirit of a chief, you see, is a powerful thing. The skull became a head again when it was lifted from the grave . . . resurrected.”
“Resurrected?” she echoed.
“Alive again,” he said, his voice measured and grievously low, prolonging every word. “But not like it was before. Not like the old chief. It’s angry now that it’s been ripped from its rest. And ravenous. Hungry for revenge. It’ll eat anyone it encounters. It’ll tear flesh from bone.”
“How?” she said.
“It rolls, gathering mud and moss on its decaying flesh.”

Black bark to her sides and ash beneath her feet, she smelled the earthy odors of dirt, mud, burnt wood, and something so vile her stomach turned. It was the same smell the wind had wafted her way on the nights she’d been chased. Only the odor was stronger now. Inescapable.

She said Frog exemplified transformation. He entered life in one form and left it in another. From egg to tadpole, to tadpole with legs, to amphibian with tail, to tailless frog, he was never the same. He began life in water, only emerging once he was his true self. He symbolized change, rebirth, and renewal, and his spirit could bring rain.
Anna stared down at the ill-fated frog. The reservation was transforming. The asphalt beneath her feet was evidence of that. And yet the very symbol of change had become a victim of it. The absurdity didn’t escape her.

A Chicago native, Nick Medina is an author and college professor of public speaking and multicultural communication…Nick’s first short story was published in 2009 and he has since had dozens more published by West Pigeon Press, Dark Highlands, and UnEarthed Press, in addition to outlets in the U.S. and the U.K., such as Midwest Literary Magazine, The Washington Pastime, The Absent Willow Review and Underground Voices.

in every fairy tale girl who is saved is the one who rescues herself.

people in love were such fools, the

in every fairy tale girl who is saved is the one who rescues herself.

people in love were such fools, they made up excuses, they wound up doing as they pleased no matter how much good advice they been given.

I think it's a bad idea to write for the moment because the moment passes so quickly. The other thing about time is that what's right and what's good and what's accepted suddenly becomes not. I thought about that with the way women were treated in "The Scarlet Letter," the way that the Puritans blamed women, and they believed in original sin and that women were responsible for that because of Eve. It all changed, but then it changes back. And then it changes again. A lot of the things that women are coping with right now are not that different, really. The judgment against women. - from the Salon interview

This new book [The Invisible Hour] actually takes place in a town where I wrote a book of connecting stories about called The Red Garden, so it's the same place. It's just a novel that takes place in that town. - from the Salon interview

“Q: Did you set out to write a novel so deeply rooted in women’s empowerment? How did it evolve to include time travel?”

“A: I started to think about The Scarlet Letter and how modern-day issues for women are not that foreign from issues in that time period. I’m not certain I realized when I first read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s great novel what the deeper meaning of his heroine’s situation is—she has no say over her body or her choices and yet, she does make her own choices. It’s a very brave book.
I’ve always wanted to time travel and been drawn to books about time travel. I think during the time of Covid, when I was writing this, more than ever I want it to be in another time period.” - from A Conversation with Alice Hoffman, an appendix in the book

Think of your first good kiss. Was it life-changing, or was it no big deal? Do you remember how old you were? Did it matter, at the time, who gave

Think of your first good kiss. Was it life-changing, or was it no big deal? Do you remember how old you were? Did it matter, at the time, who gave it to you? Do you even remember who it was?
I’ll tell you this: when you’re thirteen and your mother gives you your first good kiss, you better hope someone matches it or eclipses it—soon. That’s your only hope.

Autobiography just isn’t good or bad enough to work as fiction… Unrevised, real life is just a mess.

”That’s just who you are, Adam,” my older cousin said. “There’s a foreignness inside you—beginning with where you come from. The foreignness is in you—that’s just who you are. You and me and Ray—we’re outliers.”

Ghosts don’t just warn us about the future; they remind us of what we’ve forgotten about the past. All this is to say, I have a history of being interested in ghosts. And here come the ghosts again. In my new novel…the ghosts are more prominent than before; the ghosts, or hints of ghosts, begin and end the novel.

“My life could be a movie,” you hear people say, but what do they mean? Don’t they mean their lives are too incredible to be real—too unbelievably good or bad? “My life could be a movie” means you think movies are both less than realistic and more than you can expect from real life. “My life could be a movie” means you think your life has been special enough to get made as a movie; it means you think your life has been spectacularly blessed or cursed.
But my life is a movie, and not for the usual self-congratulatory or self-pitying reasons. My life is a movie because I’m a screenwriter. I’m first and foremost a novelist, but even when I write a novel, I’m a visualizer—I’m seeing the story unfold as if it were already on film.

Imagining the stories you want to write, and waiting to write them, is part of the writing process—like thinking about the characters you want to create, but not creating them. Yet when I did this, when I was just a kid at Exeter—when I thought about writing all the time, but I never finished anything I was writing—this amounted to little more than daydreaming.

you don’t see with hindsight in a first draft. You have to finish the first draft to see what you’ve missed.

Fiction writers like what we call truthful exaggeration. When we write about something that really happened—or it almost happened, could have happened—we just enhance what happened. Essentially, the story remains real, but we make it better than it truly was, or we make it more awful—­depending on our inclination.

…because those novels have always represented the model of the form for me. I loathed Hemingway. I thought Faulkner was excessive. Fitzgerald was ok, but lazy at times. I was enamored of the kind of novel all of my classmates at school despised.

…the dead don’t entirely go away—not if you see them on the subway, or in your heart.

I was fourteen-years old in 1968 so I experienced the strange, beguiling world of Laguna Beach as a very impressionable, wide-eyed, wonder-struck boy. When it came time to create a hero/protagonist for A Thousand Steps, I just aged myself—that fourteen-year old boy—into a sixteen-year old on the cusp of getting his driver's license, and let him take off in his mother's hippie van! - from the Mark Gottlieb interview

The best thing about journalism is that it teaches a young person how the world works. It's not the writing itself, because that is fairly straightforward and desirably formulaic. It's the exposure that's valuable. When I was 23 I was covering cultural events, movies, books, city hall, school board, fires, police -- everything but sports and business. It was a crash course on civics, human nature, bureaucracy. It was also a crash course on how the press and the government and business all interact. Those relationships are at the core of what we are as a republic.

What does the T. stand for?
Not a thing. No, really. Nada. Zip. Nothing. Jeff's mom always explained it by saying she thought the T. would look good on the President's door. - from the Bookbrowse interview

”The dominant stallion chases even off his male offspring when they’re two or three years old. It avoids inbreeding. Nature’s smart."
…”What about t

”The dominant stallion chases even off his male offspring when they’re two or three years old. It avoids inbreeding. Nature’s smart."
…”What about the female offspring?” Will said.
“He doesn’t breed with them. They’ll breed to one of the subservient stallions.”
“Would horses like this know not to do it?”
“No,” Daddy began, but Mateo approached us leading Noble, who was tossing his head and rattling the stud chain, and we went temporarily single-file to allow them to pass. “These animals haven’t been in a feral environment for generations. They don’t have the same relationships they form in a band. Given a chance, any one of them would mount his own daughter.”

In this moment I controlled what happened next. If he could use my body, I could too.

Junie rested her hiccuping head against Grandpa’s bony back as he pedaled on the bumpy road, wobbling and clanking. Across the thin fabric of his s

Junie rested her hiccuping head against Grandpa’s bony back as he pedaled on the bumpy road, wobbling and clanking. Across the thin fabric of his sweat-soaked shirt and against Junie’s cheek, his ribs rose and fell with his breathing. She recognized that moment as the beginning and the end of something—though she was too young to say exactly what that something was. But she knew, without really knowing she did, that the gossamer threads we put out into the world turned into filaments, and filaments into tendrils, and that what people called destiny was really the outward contours of billions of these tendrils, as they exerted their tug on each of us.

Her most vivid childhood memories were about music, and although they commanded attention, in the end they led nowhere. She remembered crouching on the floor under the piano as her grandfather played it above her. She was five, it was the year before her parents died…In her mind, she wasn’t just under the piano; it was more like she was wearing it as a cloak. Its vibrations enveloped her, echoed in her chest, and emanated down to her toes, claiming her, and she hugged her knees tight just to keep herself in place.

Junie scooted over toward him on her knees, reached into the well-worn tub where his feet were planted, and poked at the gnarled sinews and bones in them.
“Your legs grew roots, Grandpa,” Junie said, “like those trees by the river!”
He looked at her, then down at his own feet.
“Do you think my legs will grow roots like yours, when I’m older?”

…because of what happened to her the previous year in Beijing, Cassia understood that what set human events in motion were the most ethereal of tendrils, a kind of machinery no less powerful for its lack of discernible shape.
--------------------------------------
He had assumed that even when the weight was at its heaviest, there had been a rope that tethered them to each other, such that pulling was possible.
--------------------------------------
How did an umbilical cord turn into a noose?

“I don’t want to go anywhere,” she mumbled between spasms of breath. “I want to stay here with you and Grandma, even when you are old, forever and ever—”
Grandpa started to shake his head when he heard the word “forever,” but he saw Junie’s fever-red cheeks and stopped himself.
“If you send me away, I’ll turn,” she told him.
Grandpa stared at her.
“I’ll turn into a fish and swim back here,” she said, pointing to the direction of the river, “from America!”
“From the river?”
“I’ll learn to swim for a long way,” Junie said. She’d seen America on a map, and it was across an expanse of textured blue. But what was an ocean, after all, but a bigger body of water? And didn’t adults say that all rivers drained into the sea?

To Cassia the fog had an inviting, tactile quality. Being in its midst must be like being embraced by the most benign form of water, because you could be immersed in it without drowning.

Though I didn’t always grow up near bodies of water, in my writing I find myself drawn to rivers and coasts, probably because they gesture toward circulation and connectivity, and yet also have unique moods when observed on the time scale of days, years, decades, and even centuries.

What I hope to show with characters like Momo is that the experience of emigration, however hopeful, involves a kind of sundering, a giving up of people and things that otherwise sustain them. And because much of what they give up—the fabric of an extended family, rootedness to a place, an honest narrative of one’s own past—are wholly invisible, they often find it hard to articulate the shapes of these more wayward forms of grief. - from the Pen America interview

…this morning, while driving the last stretch of road with a storm gathering, I thought: Is it possible that grief too is like music? Maybe once grief begins, you cannot simply cut it off. Rather you have to let it run its course the way an aria comes to its last note. You cannot stop grief in its tracks any more than you can cut off the aria at just any point you deem convenient.
And maybe, like someone said, love is a wound that closes and opens, all our lives.

…the way Una thought about it, without folklore and traditions, surely Ireland didn’t really exist? Surely it might just as well be England or Fran

…the way Una thought about it, without folklore and traditions, surely Ireland didn’t really exist? Surely it might just as well be England or France or anywhere else (give or take an endless soak of rain)? So just as there were those who preserved the country’s mother tongue and those who saved up all the country’s native stories, there were those like her father who devoted their lives to maintaining the country’s old beliefs.

…these days you heard less and less about those ancient superstitions, and all the old tales cast aside for future progress.

She explained how a farmer’s wife had lost her entire family a way back in some ancient war, so in her devastation she had placed a curse which dictated certain rules around killing cattle.
Henceforth, no man could slaughter alone
Instead, seven others had to be by his side…
And ever since then, Una warned, these rules had to be adhered to or else the widow’s grief would be forgotten and the whole of Ireland would become diseased.

Gilligan admits to having made it all up. “The butchers themselves, as an idea, they are a conglomerate of loads of different kind of traditions and superstitions and myths about cattle that I just found in my research, and I just brought them all together and formed the butchers.” Part of the fun of it, I suppose is that like, it kind of could be real. It’s as real as any other set of the many, many traditions and superstitions that we still hold on to.”

There were days Ireland felt modern, and days it felt anything but.

Ooh, a storm is threatening
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Ooh yeah I'm gonna fade away
- from Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones

Ooh, a storm is threatening
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Ooh yeah I'm gonna fade away
- from Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones

I grew up on the edge of a hiking trail surrounded by woods and it was deeply formative for me. When I started writing, I found I kept coming back to those woods and trails. For me it is the site of my first yearnings and loss, the home I can never get back to. It is also a geography that resonates with other stories. We were always conscious not just of the Revolutionary War but the Lenape stories connected to the topography. It felt like hallowed ground and we spent an inordinate amount of time in those woods. It became, for me, an imaginative landscape, a place I can still conjure, the turns of the trail, how the light falls through the canopy, the tree roots that break through the surface. - from the Blue Nib interview

…as I walked toward Sage’s, I listened to the click of crickets at the wood’s edge, the slight whisper of trees, the sounds of the mountain, as if there were another frequency to hear and to be moved by. I wondered if one day I would have the same wrenching longing for this place that my father had for the sounds he’d heard growing up.

My father, as an Irish immigrant in America, loved literature. He was a landscaper and we’d be in his truck and he’s start reciting something. He’d recite lines from The Deserted Village from Oliver Goldsmith. The Song of Wandering Aengus was also one he recited a lot. My father would have such awe of these words and the power of words to transform you emotionally but also words to transform a situation. - from the Dodging the Rain interview

I walked down Horseshoe Trail toward the Kingdom, a secret fort Sage and I had made several summers before. Ahead of me was the crooked tree, our marker for leaving the path to circle into the Kingdom from the back, a routine we had so that there would never be a trace of track or footfall for anyone else to find. We imagined that the crooked tree was one of the ones Indians had used as signposts along the trail to signal where there was good hunting or soft ground for shelter. It was an oak that had started to grow upright, but suddenly the trunk made a complete right angle for two or three feet and then grew straight again. Before the Kingdom ever existed, Dad showed me the tree. He said it might have been a marker, but it could also have been caused by a bigger tree falling on the oak when it was young and then over time the bigger tree rotted and fell apart. The young tree survived but was left with this strange shape.

I often think I write more about being a child and the absence of a mother and wanting a mother. The earth maybe in a way is mothering me. - from the Dodging the Rain interview

Beside us, the shadows of dogwoods blurred in the dark as my mother kept driving, each tree hemmed in a halo of white where the bracts had fallen.

An insincere and evil friend is more to be feared than a wild beast; a wild beast may wound your body, but an evil friend will wound your mind - Buddh

An insincere and evil friend is more to be feared than a wild beast; a wild beast may wound your body, but an evil friend will wound your mind - Buddha

The beginning I know for sure. Once upon a time, My father went to the Levitation Center. I also know the next part: and he never came back.

They were slick-finish girls, cat-eye girls, hot-blood girls. They were girls who reveled. They were girls who liked boys and back seats, who slid things that weren’t theirs into tight pockets, who lit fires and did doughnuts in the high school parking lot. They were girls who left marks. They were girls who snuck. Girls who drank whiskey and worse by the waterfront…They were girls who ran away, who inked their own arms with needles and ballpoint pens, who got things pierced below the neck. (none of them named Heather, as far as I can recall)

Ambition is like love, impatient both of delays and rivals- Buddha

…she seemed to have sprung from the ground, as much a part of the landscape as the rock beneath her thighs, as unconcerned and constant as the punishing heat itself.

If I had known what was going to happen that summer, maybe I would have paid more attention to Harriet
or
Just look at what happened that summer. Look at me now.
or
I couldn’t have known that by the end of summer, one of us would be erased completely, blacked out, as though something had spilled over the photograph…
And so on

No one saves us but ourselves - Buddha

Wissen ist macht

Is there anyone who is truly as they appear?

Wissen ist macht

Is there anyone who is truly as they appear?

I finally gather the courage to look directly at Walter. His wavy blond hair is half dry, half wet. He’s saying something to Karl, but then he turns and looks at me and his face breaks into a smile. His eyes are the warmest, kindest blue.

My original plan had been to write the book from the Jewish experience. But the more I learned, the more I wanted to understand the mindset of the Nazis. How could a people, a deeply civilized, democratic nation, become so unbelievably cruel; to de-humanise one another, and commit atrocities on such an unimaginable scale? The more I read, the more I realised that what I wanted to say could perhaps be more powerfully told if I were to climb inside the head of a Nazi. To tell the tale of someone young, who was fed a twisted ideology, taught hatred from day one. Someone who knew no other way. What could possibly change their outlook, when it went so against everything their family and the society around them believed? - from Why I Wrote This Book on Fein’s website

…there is no such thing as news per se. News is power, wrapped in a message, presented, told and retold. With this newspaper…I have the power to put into the world what I want, and in the way I would have the masses understand. Do you realize what supremacy, what authority that gives me?

I didn’t set out to write a love story per se, but in thinking about what would change someone’s thinking, when they had been so thoroughly and successfully groomed into the perfect Nazi, what could possibly change their mind? Realistically, the answer had to be love. - from the BusyWords interview

I always wanted to write something about my father’s background because I knew so little about it. He died when I was seventeen and I never really got a chance to speak with him about it. - from her People Like Us book launch video

I had the benefit of a large collection of family papers, including contemporaneous diaries, photos, letters, official documents etc, all of which are now lodged with the University of Sussex’s Centre of German-Jewish Studies. This was a rich resource of contemporaneous lives, told in the raw, with no benefit of hindsight, no retrospective view through the filter of history.- from the BusyWords interview

“What did they see, Mama?” I murmured to her. “What was it that came to meet the birds that flew into the west?”
…My mother turned her face to me ov

“What did they see, Mama?” I murmured to her. “What was it that came to meet the birds that flew into the west?”
…My mother turned her face to me over her shoulder. “What came,” she said, “was night, and all its names.”

…not all migrations end with a return home. Every memory begins to cut if you hold onto it too tight.

If Simorgh unveils its face to you, you will find
that all the birds, be they thirty or forty or more,
are but the shadows cast by that unveiling.
What shadow is ever separated from its maker?
Do you see?
The shadow and its maker are one and the same,
so get over surfaces and delve into mysteries. - from that poem

The first funeral I attended was held under a black froth of wings. The deceased was a crow that had been gashed in the belly by a red-tailed hawk…That was the day my body started conspiring against me. I’d gotten my period.

I am tied by blood to Syria, and the country where my father was born is suffering while the country in which I was born still views us as not fully American. Where, then, does that leave me? And for people of Syrian descent living in diaspora, particularly for the generation of children who will grow up in exile because their parents left Syria for safety reasons, what can we take with us? What do we carry with us that cannot be lost? - from the Goodreads interview

We parted. I wiped my face with the back of my hand.
“Tell me something beautiful,” you said.
I opened my mouth and out came the only thing that I had ever known to be as beautiful as it was true, that I had once met a woman who knew how to fly.
You clasped my chilled hand in yours and lowered your gaze to our fingers. I hoped I’d said the right thing. My mother always used to say that people in mourning prefer not to talk about the earth.
“What a wonderful thing,” you said, “for just one instant, to be so close to God.”