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New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings. —Lao Tzu

There’s a certain feeling of grief when you finish a novel that has nothing to do with the anxiety and pain of finding a publisher but rather is inspired by the intimate relationships you have established with your characters. It’s even better when your readers miss them and ask about what happened after the book ended, when they vanished into some stage of your creative life, not exactly dead, after all one of them is probably you. One of my novels inspired such attachment I had people at readings inquiring after her well-being at college as if she was real and possibly having a tough freshman year. That was very encouraging but it also reminds me of the nature of this work: you create them, manipulate them, love them and finally shoot them up with massive doses of coma inducing drugs.

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A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. —Henry Adams

I was Mother Nature in kindergarten and a year later, in Ireland, hit across the knuckles with a steel edge ruler because I could not read. In fifth grade I had a teacher, Mrs. Sadler, who trusted me as a bullied child to survive without her intervention. It was a risky decision. My nemesis had intimidated and bribed the rest of the class and even paid a small boy a pound to hit me in the mouth. But Mrs. Sadler saw my potential as a swimmer, an embroiderer, a writer, and made me feel incredibly brave. Sixth grade was awful for any number of reasons, seventh grade chaotic and fun with the entire middle school housed in the National Guard Armory as our building wasn’t ready. The teachers were young, and we gradually became a feral group who terrified the high school students when we were transferred to the top floor when the Guard needed their place back.

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Striving for success without hard work is like trying to harvest where you haven’t planted. —David Bly.

Work does not set you free, but it does teach you stuff. I graduated from college with a history major into a terrible economy and my first job was taking care of the children of battered women. While their mothers who came to the shelter were being checked by doctors or were in the hospital, put on welfare, signed up for food stamps and legal aid, I shepherded their kids, babies, toddlers, little kids, and furious teens. My father used to drink and hit my mother. I was born to have that job until it nearly killed me as I drank away the images of women with black eyes and slings, kids traumatized, and so deeply hurt as witnesses to violence they might never forget. I knew. I loved them. They were like vampires and after eight months I walked away.

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