“I get suggestions all the time. People feel quite free at events or even on the street to tell me what they think I should be writing. What I’ve learned, though, is that this thing, this connection, has to be in place for me to be able to kind of launch into a world imaginatively.”
“I wrote a lot of poetry when I was a teenager – mostly desperate love poetry!”
“I took my first creative writing class when I was 24, then went onto to get a graduate degree in poetry. I’ve sort of never looked back from there.”
“It had never occurred to me to write a historical novel, but then I found Hadley in the pages of Hemingway’s ‘A Moveable Feast’ and wanted to know more about her – who she was, how she and Ernest met and fell in love, what it was like for her to be married to such a demanding and stormy force of nature.”
“There are many days when I want to throw my computer out the window, when I tell myself I’d be better off selling shoes at the mall. But I always keep at it, because I have to. Writing is completely part of who I am. Even if I never published another book, I would keep at it – because it feeds my life and makes it richer.”
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