Friday, September 19, 2003

Forgive me, readers, for I have sinned. It has been four months since my last blog. A very intense and wonderful and horrible four months. An eternity. But here I am.

I wish I could encapsulate the last four months for you. My dinner with Barbara Kingsolver (we ate Nepalese and Tibetan food! Ping noodles and butter tea! And she is the loveliest, most generous woman. When she introduced me at my reading, she said she felt like she wasn't giving the world a book, she was giving the world an author. I still get chills when I think about it.) My book tour, where I met so many warm and wonderful people (thanks to all of you!) and stumbled upon so many wild, sometimes goosebump inducing, moments of synchronicity (when I read in Boulder, I met a woman who had heard my radio interview in Santa Cruz the week before. A bird crashed into her windshield and, sadly, died, while she was listening to me talk about dead birds!) The deep sadness in our family when two relatives died unexpectedly within weeks of each other. We are all still reeling. Life continues to be full of surprises--so much beauty and pain and neverending wonder.

I started writing a memoir this summer, which is something I never expected to do. It came to me in a dream, and when I woke up, entire chapters were clambering to be written. I'm about half way done with it now (at least the first draft of it)--it's been a healing and surprisingly amusing endeavor. The glimmerings of a new novel have also started to spark.

I will try to stay in better touch. In the meanwhile, here's a recent interview. Hope everyone is doing well!