Our mother had faith in literature the way others had faith in God or America; she put herself in its hands the way patients did their physicians; she prescribed it, she preached it.

There are a thousand things to hear about, informationally, daily, but the thing that doesn’t go away is the one to pay attention to.

Readers will share in the environs of the author and her characters, be taken into the hardship of a pitiless place and emerge on the other side – wiser, warier and weathered like the landscape.

Writing is a completely private act. It’s in a way like play but very serious play, and sometimes I can escape into the fictional world that I’m creating so fully as to see hours go by without my noticing it. I think that kind of suspension of time and that mindfulness is a real gift.

Melissa Pritchard’s prose, that darkly lyrical firmament, is brightened by the dizzy luminous arrangement of her stars and satellites, her great gifts to us: humor, irony, kindness, brilliance.

I definitely don't think of myself as someone identified by region. It's too far-flung a region, for starters, and southern New Mexico is very isolated. I wouldn't think of my identity as generational, either, but maybe as more stylistic, in the school of realism and domestic issues.

Fiction ought to announce the problems, dramatize the problems, display them. Yet offer no set answer. An answer would solve the mystery. Writing fiction, for me, is about putting on paper my obsessive interest in something mysterious. I may figure out the source of the mystery, the things that brought some action or image to my mind, but to make an equation of it would ruin the story.

Writing is a completely private act. It's in a way like play but very serious play, and sometimes I can escape into the fictional world that I'm creating so fully as to see hours go by without my noticing it. I think that kind of suspension of time and that mindfulness is a real gift.

Is not Justice just a nice way to say revenge.

Readers will share in the environs of the author and her characters, be taken into the hardship of a pitiless place and emerge on the other side — wiser, warier and weathered like the landscape.