But We Were Interested In How Our

If She Were A Writer She Would Collect Her Pencils And Notebooks And Favourite Cat And Write In Bed. Strangers And Lovers Would Never Get Past The Locked Door.

Every Immigrant Family, It Seems, Has Someone Who Does Not Belong In The New Country They Have Come To. It Feels Like Permanent Exile To That One Brother Or Wife Who Cannot Stand A Silent Fate In Boston Or London Or Melbourne. I’ve Met Many Who Remain Haunted By The Persistent Ghost Of An Earlier Place.

There's A Lot Of Thievery Involved In Writing. You're Breaking Into Other People's Spaces And Other People's Stories.

You Are Doing Something Over Here And Over There Someone Is Telling You A Joke, Or Giving You An Important Piece Of Information About Sanitation, And No Matter How Weird The Other Subject Is, There Is A Connection, Or You Can Make A Connection. I’ve Always Loved History And History Is Collage, It Is A Juxtaposition Of The Good And The Bad And The Strange, And How You Place Those Sentences Together Changes The Whole Mood Of A History.

The Desert Could Not Be Claimed Or Owned — It Was A Piece Of Cloth Carried By Winds, Never Held Down By Stones, And Given A Hundred Shifting Names Before Canterbury Existed, Long Before Battles And Treaties Quilted Europe And The East ... All Of Us, Even Those With European Homes And Children In The Distance, Wished To Remove The Clothing Of Our Countries. It Was A Place Of Faith. We Disappeared Into Landscape.