I Grew Up Sort Of Middle Class,

I Love Short Stories. They're Like Small Imploding Universes. They Are Very Tightly Bound And Controlled. I'd Been Wanting To Write One For Ages But Just Got Tangled Up In Novels. The Novel Is The Same In The Sense That It Is Also A Universe, But It Explodes Outwards With All That Shrapnel Going In Several Different Directions. I Don't See Too Much Difference In The Forms Except For The Fact That Writing Short Stories Is Like Sprinting Rather Than Long-distance Running.

There Are Moments We Return To, Now And Always. Family Is Like Water - It Has A Memory Of What It Once Filled, Always Trying To Get Back To The Original Stream.

There Are Rocks Deep Enough In This Earth That No Matter What The Rupture, They Will Never See The Surface. There Is, I Think, A Fear Of Love. There Is A Fear Of Love.

We Have To Admire The World For Not Ending On Us.

I Was Fascinated By The Lack Of A Word For A Parent Who Has Lost A Child. We Have No Word In English. I Thought For Sure There'd Be A Word In Irish But There Is None. And Then I Looked In Several Other Languages And Could Not Find One, Until I Found The Word Sh'khol In Hebrew. I'm Still Not Sure Why So Many Languages Don't Have A Word For This Sort Of Bereavement, This Shadowing.