When I was a girl, questioning everything my mother told me to do or not to do, she said it was a phase. It was not. We may try on different identities, remake ourselves again and again – Madonna or David Bowie style, but self-identification is not something we are likely to outgrow – as… Continue Reading
Flawed Characters
What makes a flawed character? Are they divergent? Are they so far outside the norm as to make them unbelievable? Or are they simply more human? Aren’t we all flawed characters on the stage of life – good and bad, happy and sad, fickle and steady? You get my drift. All of our ways of… Continue Reading
Un-swept Rooms
Do you have un-swept rooms in your mind like I do? Are there crumbs of unresolved disputes, dust bunnies filled with longing, or shadows that chase you in your dreams? Un-swept rooms can make good fodder for fiction. I have long suspected fiction was where “real” truth existed, if at all. We may call nonfiction… Continue Reading
Mother/Daughter Relationships
In WHO CAN KNOW THE HEART I examine complex mother/daughter relationships, not precisely because I have unresolved issues (though I might have) but because I find the subject one that allows for an interesting exploration of one matrix of the human condition. My oldest sister, twenty years my senior, once told me that by the… Continue Reading
On Self-Examination
The title, WHO CAN KNOW THE HEART, refers to a Bible verse in Jeremiah. I settled on this because it seemed to fit the narrative of deceit – better than Long Distance Running, that is. Self-examination was the index marker in the topical reference from which I located the scripture. I’m talking about critical contemplation,… Continue Reading
On Ambiguous Endings
I tend to think in terms of overlaps – pizza pan thinking instead of muffin tin compartmentalizing. A story’s beginning may be a kind of walking start; or it could have a more static descriptive start or be a conversation. Beginnings seem to vary without complaint. Endings, on the other hand, often get a… Continue Reading
On Freedom
Recently I watched a video of Jonathan Franzen discussing his novel Freedom on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Oprah’s first question related to the title, and his answer had to do with all the ways in which we are not free. His words caused me to reflect on my own definitions of freedom. I ran long… Continue Reading
What’s love got to do with it?
In the most general sense, when I set out to write WHO CAN KNOW THE HEART, I wanted to say something about love. It did not amount to a premise. It was just a thought. Then I situated that thought into a time frame and within a specific dysfunctional American family. The St. James family… Continue Reading
Social Accountability in the Drama of Identity
In the struggle for social accountability, “undoing the proper” (de Certeau) is often necessary. The “proper” here is an official site: a “safe” or even unsafe space that gives haven to the status quo, a site that lets comfort affect one’s ability to see poverty and suffering. When the price of being at home in… Continue Reading
Theater of Identity, Part Three
I’ve always read like a writer. When I was in college and graduate school, new criticism was the preferred methodology used in literature classes. For me it was a means of discovering how writers got particular effects. And I wanted to write fiction. Although I’ve spent most of my adult life doing research and publishing… Continue Reading
Undercurrents 
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