I researched Payne’s Prairie, sinkholes, indigenous Florida tribes, and prehistoric fossils.
It was both fun and fascinating. The magic came from my imagination, which surprised me.

It’s very odd that Dreaming the Marsh is my first novel. My obsession is not with the environment, but with children and poor people and injustice, yet I have described this book as an environmental fable. I don’t believe in the slightest in magic, yet magic infuses the book, and completely delights me. The book began with an image of a sinkhole swallowing a house, and an odd verse which came to me, and which I didn’t particularly understand. It all grew (magically!) from that.

Of course I did! I received literally hundreds of rejections from agents before I found one for my second novel, and then she couldn’t find a publisher. I submitted to many small presses. I submitted stories over and over to literary journals, and only had one published, in Slow Trains, an internet journal. I had long stretches where I stopped submitting. Sometimes I stopped writing for a few months, partly due to family demands, but also because I just couldn’t find the discipline to keep on when it seemed no one would ever read what I wrote. I always resumed the writing though – my characters kept calling me, and when I stopped writing I wasn’t sure who I was.

Everything has changed. I get up in the morning eager to begin work, and when I don’t have writing and publishing business to attend to, and can return to my next novel or my blog, the ideas just flow, and the words tumble over each other. Before I retired I had a satisfying and interesting career practicing and teaching law, but the work made me more anxious than happy. When I’m writing, or thinking about it, I escape life’s ordinary tasks and troubles. Writing makes me happy.

My blog essays start with a stray thought, but for fiction, ideas come to me in images. With Dreaming the Marsh, I was walking past a house raised on cinder blocks and suddenly pictured a huge sinkhole opening underneath. For Year of the Child (not yet published) – a baby left behind a dumpster. For Seeing the Edge (not yet published) – I was washing my bedroom window and pictured a man standing behind me at the edge of the woods. Sometimes an opening phrase comes into my head – “The sun popped up there at the edge of the world.” 

I usually write on my laptop, but when that’s not around, I write in my notebook. I don’t outline, exactly – I begin from the image, and see where it leads. Sometimes the image is transformed or completely disappears. I’m well into the book when I realize (or think I do) the course of the journey and how it will end. But it’s like traveling with a road map – you know you’ll take this road and that road, go from Miami to Fort Pierce to Jacksonville, but you have no idea what you’ll see or what will happen along the way, and you may decide to take some back roads.

I think in scenes, which often become chapters. When I’m stuck I may make a list of the next few scenes. As I write, ideas come. For instance, a character walks outside – what does she see, does she trip over a root? Words flow from each other too, and when I read back over what I’ve written, I’m often delighted to see that I’ve created a lovely rhythm, or the words resonate well together.

This makes it all sound magical and easy. There is magic, and sometimes days of bliss, lost in my fictional world. But more often the first draft is a slog, staring into the void. I love the work after the first draft – I feel very confident editing, and have a clear sense of what works and what doesn’t. I certainly revise as I write – rearrange sentences, change words. But major revisions follow the first full draft, and I write many drafts – for my third novel I had seventeen drafts, trying different voices, drastically changing the plot.

No. What I value is making stuff up, especially creating characters and trying to enter the minds and hearts of people who are very different from me. In the course of writing my fourth, yet-to-be-completed novel, I wrote about 70,000 words, from the point of view of someone very like me, and to my dismay I found I didn’t like her! She is now a fairly minor character in the book – her mother and father are the central figures.

I think I’m a little like Tyler in Dreaming the Marsh, who studied the earth because he loved it and knew it was dying. I am not at all optimistic; you might even say I’ve lost all hope. It’s certainly not just climate change. It’s the poisons and clutter we have inflicted on this magnificent rock we call home, which we have occupied for about 300,000 years. We are terribly intelligent and perilously unwise. 

Like Charlotte in Seeing the Edge, a not-yet-published novel, I find comfort in our cosmic insignificance. We are tiny specks in a huge universe, human life occupying only the smallest fraction of a second of eternal time. We don’t matter.

Of course, we DO matter to us, and we matter to me. I grieve for my grandchildren, for all the people to come. I think dystopia, not utopia, lies ahead: poison and disease, droughts and desperate migrations, social unrest followed by cruel tyranny. I certainly hope we don’t, in all our idiot hubris, travel into space to colonize and poison yet another world.

That is my cosmic view, and it’s unremittingly grim. But each of us is here for only a brief while. Why should we not make that while as rich and jubilant as possible? For me, that means trying to be good and kind, learning and creating, rejoicing in the beauty and marvels of the natural world. Not to mention cooking, eating, singing and dancing.

One part of being good is to avoid contributing to the destruction of our and many other species. I am imperfect and far from thorough in this. I compost, and recycle what I can in the bins my city provides. I use cloth napkins, and get a kick out of buying a Round-up sprayer and filling it with Dr Bonners soap and Tabasco instead of pesticides to get rid of mites on my orange tree. But I’m daunted by coral ardisia and camphor trees, don’t see how I can manage the labor of eliminating these invasive species from my yard. I was horrified to read for the first time that Boston fern is also invasive – I have huge crops of this under the hedge and at the edge of the woods. At least it pulls up easily. 

We keep the thermostat at 68 in winter and 80 in summer, but we use paper towels and household poisons, and we waste water. I’m glad my city has banned plastic bags, because I’m always forgetting my tote bags, even when I keep them in the car. I could go on with a long list of my environmental sins – I travel as often as I can, eat food that has traveled from afar. I suppose my greatest sin is that I am part of the greediest country in the world, consuming way beyond our needs. With five percent of the world’s population we use twenty-five percent of the energy, and generate fifty percent of its solid waste.

As such an environmental pessimist, where does my hope lie? It lies in evolution. Were I around in 500 years I think I would find myself the only surviving human, and all the tigers, bees, frogs and lobsters would be gone. It’s unbearable even to write that – I love us, and the other species whose habitat we are ruining. But just as Tyler sees green shoots rising in the rubble of the sinkhole, I believe we will not destroy all life on earth, or make earth uninhabitable. From the cockroach or tardigrade or some green shoot, in many millions of years evolution will create a strange new world as varied and rich as our own.

I am a feminist, and proud of the name. To me feminism is about women supporting and valuing women, while always recognizing the ways in which we differ, our various races, experiences, circumstances and viewpoints. It’s about looking at institutions and asking whether they are shaped to meet the needs of women, to empower women and hear their voices. It’s about changing institutions so that women can be self-supporting and achieve power in the workplace, while still valuing the roles and work that women have traditionally been responsible for. It’s about encouraging men to expand their role in the family and share domestic work as equal partners.

As a group, I like women more than men. I understand and forgive our foibles. I see the world through a female lens, and value “women’s work.” My heroes are the suffragists, the welfare rights organizers, the barely-acknowledged women in the civil rights movement, the women who get up every day and do what has to be done though they receive no recognition and very little reward, and the countless women in the third world struggling against all the brutal forms of patriarchy.

No. I joined one for a while, but it wasn’t good for writing novels. It takes me a long time to finish a first draft. A group can’t read a whole novel, and chapter by chapter feedback doesn’t work for me. I like to get feedback after I’ve revised it over and over, and taken it as far as I can go.

The Feminist Grandma has been excellent writing practice. When I’m starting an essay I don’t know quite where it will go. I just throw down all the ideas I have, and a shape emerges. Having written many of these now, I have no doubt I will find clarity. I have also become a quick and confident editor – I rarely dither.

To some extent this method and this confidence have spilled over into my fiction writing. I think writer’s block comes from doubt and fear. I don’t often suffer from that, though I sometimes find the prospect of spending years writing a novel a bit daunting.

I first started writing book reviews to reach out to authors I admire. I find I really enjoy doing it. I read more carefully when I intend to review a book. As with The Feminist Grandma, sometimes I have to struggle to figure out what I think, and I learn a lot about how authors do what they do. That’s why I’ve created the second blog, to continue connecting with other authors and learning about writing. I review books which are not well-known, sometimes books that are older. I will only review books I can praise – there’s not much point in saying, “Here’s a book you’ve never heard of, and I don’t recommend it.”