After sex, after coffee, after everything there is to be said -- The hovering and beautiful alphabet as we form our first words after making love. And somehow I'm still alive.

How I love them. How good they are. They endure endless hours of me talking about the future. They keep me near and at the same time bid me farewell. That is what real love is.

If writing is language and language is desire and longing and suffering . . . then why when we write, when we make shapes on paper, why then does it so often look like the traditional, straight models, why does our longing look for example like John Updike's longing?

The Voice of the River is a beautifully written, deeply inclusive and profoundly spirtual work of art. I am moved by its great genorosity above all, and its wisdom. It is a gift like no other.

One of the strangest things about writing well is that it requires two different zones in the brain--rigor and recklessness--simultaneously.