We are surrounded by story.
I think it's handy for a dramatist of any sort, if I can call myself that, to make use of weddings and wakes, to make use of those moments and those rituals that cause us to pause and look back or look forward and understand that life has changed.
I am trying to cultivate the notion that constantly misplacing one's cell phone is a charming eccentricity... my children aren't buying it.
At the beginning of every semester, I ask my graduate students whether there is something I should read that will help me understand their work.
It worries me that undergrads and high school students are forced into books they aren't ready for, like Faulkner's, and then they are afraid of putting their toes in the water again.
The language of the Catholic Church - the liturgy, the prayer, the gospels - was in many ways my first poetry.
What interests me is whatever it is that allows the heart to continue to yearn for something the intelligence knows is impossible to have: a lost love, a shelter from life's blows, the return of a time past, even a connection to the dead.
A tendency to make metaphorical connections is an occupational hazard for those of us who write.
I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. My parents had memorized poems from their days attending school in New York City and loved reciting them. We all enjoyed listening to these poems and to music as well.
Much of my experience with language was formed in the church, which has an oral tradition. There are lots of repetitions in prayers and song refrains. There's a sense of incantation, that if you call not once and not twice but for a third time, the spirit appears.
I read a little bit of nonfiction and a lot of poetry. I think of poetry as my shot of whiskey when I don't have time to savor a whole bottle of wine.
I am not a theologian or a historian, and I feel no call to become a defender of the faith, so in my case, the search for what remains valuable focuses on language itself: Catholic prayer, ritual, the naming of things.
Those of us who know the transporting wonder of a reading life know that it little matters where we are when we talk about books or meet authors or bemoan the state of publishing because when we read, we are always inside, sheltered in that interior room, that clean, well-lighted, timeless place that is the written word.
