It has taken me all these years to begin to spare myself from battling reality, to begin to admit that certain human beings whom I love cannot love me, and that the leash around my neck is made out of links forged every time I battle this fact.
Spurring Us Forward
I believe there are young women, as well as older women and certainly some men, who are beginning to claim this noble, long-rooted word—feminism—that connects us to a heroic tradition as well as spurring us forward into the future.
Smiles
We grimace, we grin, but how often during daily life does anyone give, or receive a smile?
Irrepressible Crank
Sometimes I think we are all too nice.
Hopscotch House
Thirty years ago, it was a big plain farmhouse on a high rise of pasture when I first saw what would become Hopscotch House.
Cleaning Out My Outhouse
I enjoy my outhouse because it is in my view transgressive. I enjoy transgressions and I miss the energy of evil… the shaking of the roots of our assumptions… in most of the contemporary fiction I read and even in a lot of the fiction I write.
Wolf Pen Mill Farm: A Love Story
We women are creators, and when we have the means, we are creators of historic proportions.
The Happy Miner
When I worked as a courier for the Frontier Nursing Service, we were told to sing as we rode in the mountains so the moonshiners would know we were girls and hold their fire.
Dog Love
He let me know he feels leashes are an indignity by chewing up two of them and making good progress on the third.
Tear ‘Em Down, Slats and All
It was a revelation to me when I was lured back to Kentucky and saw the reverence people there felt for old houses—and how hard they would work to preserve them.