|
|
Hello! Welcome to my website.
I started writing fiction and poetry when I was 18 years old, and I have traveled a crooked and winding path to these, my first books: Sufficient Grace (Free Press/Simon&Schuster, June 2006) and What Travels With Us: Poems (LSU Press, October 2005). Each book has been published within months of my 50th birthday and shortly after I became a grandmother. Right now, my life feels a little bit like a Cinderella story. But remember, Cinderella spent years cleaning out the fireplace!
My friend and poet Dana Wildsmith says, "We write to save what we love." And I think writers learn to love so much more than just the happy moments in their lives. Over the years, when I had small children and a list of priorities that pushed writing to the margins, I had all these characters in my head. Each of them possessed a little piece of me or my life or some special intimacy I'd witnessed when I was paying attention to someone else's life for a few minutes. So I made lots of notes and wrote lots of short paragraphs in snatches of time. Many of these characters are encapsulated in poems in What Travels With Us, a book full of teeny tiny short stories cast in poetic forms. Some of these seeds have grown into stories, and others into the novel, Sufficient Grace, and the novel and story ideas filling notebooks in my messy office.
While many of my goals and priorities have changed over thirty years, writing has never fallen to the wayside. A few years ago, my husband gave me the gift of time and encouragement, and I finally had the attention span to finish Sufficient Grace.
I hope you enjoy the fruits of my long journey. May you also find interesting and useful information on this site, and may it lead you to other good books, good authors, and good resources. If I meet you on the road, please let me know you visited with me here.
With warm regards,
Darnell
|
