In 2007, I came to live, for a humid fall season, in the home where I am writing this now. In this home a woman, now long dead, hunched over a typewriter--at least, I always imagine Carson McCullers hunching when she wrote, because her shoulders in photos always look slightly rounded, and her body seems to curl into anything she cares most about, she loves--and here she dreamed and got up and paced around and looked at the patterns in the carpet, waiting for the words, the idea, the…

I've been thinking about my ballet-dancing days today.  As some of you know, before I was a writer, I was a professional ballet dancer, a career I loved to the moon and back; the stage also taught me a great deal I would use on the page--about rhythm, pacing, arc, tempo, movement, stamina, how to keep going going going until you think you…