Writers on Writing

Doris Lessing: “Whatever you are meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”

Jayne Anne Phillips: "Writers focus perpetually on the half seen, and we live in the dim or glorious shadows of partially apprehended shapes. We could bill ourselves as perceptually challenged — given that we live two lives at once, segueing from one to the other with some distress — but we accept, long before we publish, the outlaw's mantle. We occupy a kind of border country, focused on the details that speak to us."

William H. Gass: “For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.”

Natalie Diaz: “My friend and I call grief the beautiful terrible because it is a wound that opens you but also shows you the miracles of what is inside you. Rather than try to escape my griefs, I’m trying to recognize them as a wildness I can submerge myself in, to be washed clean by the very thing that aches me so deeply. To give my grief to a beloved’s body, to take her grief into my body, to rearrange ourselves with it and become both more and less of one another and of our own selves—this is a lucky thing.”  See poem: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/grief-work