When I Write New Worlds, I Work

I Feel Lucky. I Do Love It, Mostly. At College I Had It In My Heart That I Wanted To Be A Writer But I Didn't Want To Tell Anyone About It. Then I Graduated And Became A Bartender In Philadelphia, Writing During The Day. I Was The Worst Bartender In The World.

I Like People, I Really Do. I Like Meeting People. But Most Of The Time I Would Rather Be At Home Reading A Book Than Reading In A Bookstore. It's A Performance, And It Ends Up Being All Right, And Then You Have A Nice Shot Of Bourbon Afterwards, And It's All Good. I Want To Please People. I Want To Be Nice. I Want To Be Liked. As A Result I Say Yes To Everything. But It Takes A Lot Of Vital Energy Out Of Me.

The Novella Is At Once The Most Elegant And Demanding Form: A Writer Must Balance The Looseness Of A Novel With The Concision Of A Short Story, A Feat That Only The Bravest And Most Talented Of Us Can Manage. In Brazil, Jesse Lee Kercheval Proves, Yet Again, That She Is Exactly The Right Writer For The Job. A Wild American Picaresque, Brazil Snaps Along Briskly, Yet Feels Full-fleshed, And Brims With A Sly Wit And Grace.

A Female Writer Does Definitely Get More Attention If She Writes About Male Characters. It's True. It's Considered Somehow More Literary, In The Same Way That It's More Literary To Write About Supposedly Male Subjects, Such As War. You're Considered More Seriously By The Literary Establishment.

Reading About Utopianism, And Eventually Creating Characters With Their Own Utopian Ambitions, Was The Way I Learned To Live With Being A Pregnant Person, To Stave Off The Sense Of Incipient Disaster. You're Bringing A Person Into This Overcrowded World, Knowing They're One Day Going To Die And There's Nothing You Can Do About It.