My father's parents were Irish. Only a year before my father died, he and I went back to Ireland for a week to look at the old homestead.
On the night before we were married, all of the anxiety in the world came down upon me.
My mother wanted very much to play tennis; she wanted, most of all, to be a singer and play the piano.
I was not typical. Whatever typical or normal is, I was somehow separated and different.
When we lived in Juneau, Alaska, it was a town of about 7,000 people, and totally isolated; the only way to get to it was by ship.
When I started writing fiction, I knew how good it was immediately.
I used to carry about with me a German map-case filled with poems.
As in The Lime Twig dream and illusion are right at the center of Charivari.
I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.
I'm only interested in fiction that in some way or other voices the very imagination which is conceiving it.
I remember my mother finding mud somehow and putting it on the sting.
In The Lime Twig I took two very young people and made them very old.
I didn't for a moment doubt the choice, but if life is ever fearsome, it is truly fearsome then.
I didn't know what kind of jobs, because how was I prepared? At best, I would be an AB in English.