Since the age of four I knew I was supposed to write, but I was almost fifty years old before I figured out what I was supposed to say. Either the words only came then, or it was only then, when I was older, that I was finally able to hear them. Words are very finicky. If you don't pay proper attention to them and write them down immediately, they go away and never come back.

Writing is my calling, the ground zero of my life, what I count on, cling to. Writing is where I am the most myself even though most of my life consists of doing things other than writing. I moved many times to follow my husband's career. When our five children were grown, I went to graduate school and became a cognitive behavioral therapist. It has been good for me, I think, that I ended up being a writer second and many other things first, so that I became more a person who sometimes writes than a writer who sometimes persons.

Although writing is supposed to be a lonely craft, it is because I write that I never feel alone. I am always in the company of some imagined reader to whom I tell my stories; what I have done, or failed at, or suffered, or missed. The mistakes, the fears, the disappointments, the remorse that can break your heart and have you wondering about the worth of your soul are the writer's raw materials.

There is something wonderful and exciting and magical about the craft of writing. If I pursue the truth of a thing faithfully enough and doggedly enough, then, and often from a completely unexpected direction, a little of that truth reveals itself to me and I write it down just as quickly as I can before it disappears forever. In these moments when something really works, when I get it just right, I still don't know where the magic of writing comes from. But I have discovered the magic to being an author. Only at the exact moment when you are at last able to give something away do you finally possess it for the first time.