Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

The first story I ever wrote, at age seven, was a re-telling of the Red Riding Hood fairy tale. In my version, a little girl buys a red convertible and drives away. No wolf. No grandma. Just a hood-less red car. As an adult I’ve published four novels, a story collection, and one hybrid book of memoir and fiction. Writing books is my preferred way to escape the burden of having a self, of carrying that self around your whole life, of never totally understanding why you are the way you are, nor why other people are the way they are. The Red Riding Hood story used to be a joke I’d tell, but now it seems to me the subject I had the impulse to write about at seven– a story of escaping limits, of rejecting the previous script– it pretty much sums up everything I ever hope to do.

While at Headlands

I’ll be working on the first draft of a new novel called The Swamp, about a southern matriarch’s death and the complicated legacy she leaves for her son.