Come and Go, Molly Snow
by Mary Ann Taylor-Hall
bookclub@ket staff members Bill Goodman and Liz Hobson conducted this interview with Mary Ann Taylor-Hall at her home near Sadieville, Kentucky in July 1999.
Bill: Tell us a little bit about how you came to Kentucky.
Mary Ann: Oh, all right. I taught at the University [of Kentucky] when I was in my 20s—in the English Department. I was here for about two and a half years; and I had come to Kentucky then just because that’s where I got a job, but it was also true that my father is, was, a Kentuckian, and so ... His parents actually had him ... He was born in Florida, but he came up to Kentucky during the summers. So a lot of the family stories that I have known always were about Woodford County, where his mother had been born and raised. I felt like I was coming to this place that had a real kind of charged atmosphere for me because it had always seemed like the promised land.
I remember ... I was born in Chicago, and when I was a child, we made a trip to Woodford County and to Frankfort, where my great-aunt lived, for two weeks, and it just made this absolutely indelible impression on me. My great-aunt lived right on the Kentucky River, and I was a child who had grown up in, essentially, the slums of Chicago, and the only country I had ever seen was the park that we used to walk to. But the Woodford County people lived in a very beautiful part of the county and had a great big old farmhouse with four-poster beds and things like that, which was just something that was just entirely new to me. They drank buttermilk with ice cubes in it [laughing]—I remember that. And so I was just blown away as a child by having come from a place ... To be truthful, we didn’t even have a bathtub! So anyway, after that summer we moved from Chicago to Florida, and then I went on through school, and this was my second teaching job. We came in the late ’60s, I guess—mid to late ’60s—so I was here for two and a half years, and then I went on into this, you know, travels I can’t even remember now. I must have had ten addresses before I came back to Kentucky, I guess about ten years later.
Liz: Were you teaching all that time?
Mary Ann: No, I was teaching some of the time and then I was just traveling. I was married
by then to a very peripatetic man, and we kept going across the Atlantic Ocean and
back and forth and back and forth; and it was nice, but I was really dying for a home.
So I basically came to Kentucky to stay with my friends the Richards,
whose farm this is, for a month to give writing one last try. That’s what I
had always wanted to do, you know, and so I got here and I just never left, essentially.
I had thought, “If I can’t get something seriously going with my writing, I’m going to
get a really grown-up job”—instead of the kinds of things I had been doing all these
years—and just be something else besides a writer. I had had a little bit of early success as a writer. I had published a couple of stories while I was in my mid-20s and then I’d started a novel, which I simply could not marshal my energy and attention for. So I came to Kentucky and the Richards offered me this house to live in and said I could live in it rent-free. So I was living like I sometimes did: a little stint of adjunct teaching at UK—when one of the regular writing faculty would go away, I’d teach a writing class or two. And so I basically [was] living on $2,000 a year with a garden. You know, it was just very basic living for several years.
Bill: And this was what year?
Mary Ann: I came back in ’77, I think, and so eventually I got
an NEA, which was just ... When they start talking about canceling NEAs, I think about
my poor self, you know, and how much it saved my life when I most needed it.
I had written, by then, a novella; and on the basis of that they gave me the NEA.
After that things started changing around a little bit, but that’s how I started
to live here in Kentucky.
Bill: Did you always think you would come back here?
Mary Ann: No. No, no, no, no. I thought when I left Kentucky I was leaving for good, back in the late ’60s. I went from there to Puerto Rico and from there to ... Well, I came back and lived in Kentucky for about five or six months while I was regrouping and lived in a friend’s tack room of their horse barn and did the night watching on their horse farm. And then I went off again. Then I married and I was going to England, New York, and various ... Pennsylvania and several other places—Puerto Rico for a while. And then I lived in Brooklyn again for a couple of years before coming back to Kentucky. Then I didn’t move—I didn’t go anywhere [laughs]—after I came to Kentucky. Too tired to move.
Bill: Well, let’s talk a little bit about
Come and Go, Molly Snow and the story and the characters. What did you draw on in the very beginning to write that?
Mary Ann: You know, I really don’t know. It emerged sort of so much through the back door. I think that my first inkling of what I was doing was just in an image that I kept seeing of a young woman in desperate trouble, being cared for by an older woman or by two older women, and I saw the place sort of clearly in my mind—a kind of feeling of the house that they lived in. But that’s all I knew [sighs]. And so, as I wrote, it became clear to me that one of the things that I was doing was sort of honoring this countryside and the people who live around here. It seemed very rich to me, that world, and I just felt that it spoke to me a lot; I appreciated it. So I started writing about that. And the character of Carrie Marie—I just couldn’t tell you where she came from; I just don’t know. She isn’t at all autobiographical, except in the fact that she came from Florida and is bound out of Florida.
Her voice just got in my head. I mean, it was a voice that I knew I was familiar with. Everybody who lives in Kentucky sort of gets that rhythm in their ears and knows it. But I still didn’t know she was a musician or anything at the beginning. [I] kept going back and forth between the first person and the third person and trying to decide whether the viewpoint could extend into the other characters. Finally I understood that it resided in her and that for some reason, although I don’t usually write in first person, this book seemed like it had to be written in the first person. In the process of solving what was wrong with her, I thought that it had to be something really significant in order to support the voice. I thought, “Well, what is the worst thing that can happen to a person?” And then, having taken on that subject in such a slant-wise way, I suddenly found myself writing about something I had absolutely no experience about, which was the death of a child. Beyond that, how she got to be a bluegrass musician was that ... First of all, I thought she was married, and I had to figure out a reason for her husband not to be there. So I said, “Oh well, he is a musician.” Then I said, “Well, he must be a country-western musician.” Then I don’t know when it came to me that bluegrass music had the tone in the music of the voice that was coming out much more particularly. And the more I listened to bluegrass music, the more I wanted to write about it. I wasn’t by any means an expert on bluegrass music.
Bill: Tell us about that, because you really capture that so well. We would ask if you studied bluegrass music. Were you just a fan; did you attend bluegrass festivals? Did you get to know some of the artists?
Mary Ann: I started just by listening. I didn’t even have any bluegrass albums, so I borrowed some from a friend, Jonathan Green, who happened to have a bunch of them. And he lent me several, and then I started ordering them and listening to them; and the more I listened to them, the more I liked them. And I went to a couple of bluegrass festivals, the ones here—the Festival of the Bluegrass—but that’s all I knew. You know, when I was very young, I had that first Lester Flatt-Earl Scruggs album back in the, in the ’50s and didn’t even know that that was bluegrass music at that time. I really loved it. It just was country music, is what we called that.
It’s funny, because growing up in Florida, there was a station that played that music and nobody would listen to it. I mean none of us [laughs]—we wouldn’t have been caught dead listening to that music; then we were all for Nat King Cole [laughs]. So anyway, I started out thinking that the guy was a bluegrass musician, and then I said, “Hey, you know, she can be one, too; and that will be fun.” So when I started dealing with that, it ... I started reading the two bluegrass magazines. I read them, but there is not a whole lot of written material about bluegrass music, and when I, when I made her a fiddler, I had never held a fiddle in my hand. I play the piano a little bit, but I’m not a musician at all. So the only literature I could find was on classical violin.
Bill: Did you talk to fiddlers?
Mary Ann: I talked to a few—fewer than you might think. I read a lot of interviews. I was too shy. I mean, if I had gone up to some bluegrass musician at a festival and said, “I’m writing a novel about bluegrass music,” do you think they would have said, “Yeah, right”? [Laughs] You know, I couldn’t ... I didn’t have a leg to stand on, you know, to request that kind of time; but I would get as close to the ... You know, they would come in and there is a lot of mingling going on, and I’d just get up as close to it as I could and eavesdrop, basically, is where I picked up what I knew. And I would go to ... As I got into the parts where I really needed to know something about the music, which I kept on saying, “I will get to that later; I’ll get to that later.” But then it was later and I needed to do it. I went to a couple of ... You know, they had fiddling classes at the Woodland Fair and things like that, and I would sit in on them and listen. And I picked up a whole lot of information that way, and ... But it was basic—it was very non-aggressive research that I did, you know; it was only kind of a sidling research, is what it was.
Bill: Did you meet Cap at one of these?
Mary Ann: No. I never met Cap.
Except afterwards it was so funny ... During one of the ... I started going down to Owensboro, to the bluegrass festival there—Fanfest, Fanfare, I think they called it—but there is a lot of, you know, picking in the back lots during that fair. And at this point MGM had interested them, had bought the script, and I had these people [who] had converged: the director—the proposed director—the writer, and the producer. All had come to Owensboro, you know, from these vastly more important things that they were doing. But they really got into it. The direct—the guy who was going to be the director—was this British guy, and we sat around ... There was this guitar player who was just—I mean, he was Cap; but I didn’t see him until afterwards. I mean, he—as many bluegrass musicians do—he had an injury to his hand, I think. He had, you know, a couple of fingers missing or something.
Bill: Hmmm ...
Mary Ann: And he was a wonderful, wonderful guitar player. But I just kept thinking, that’s the one, you know [laughs]. He’s ... But no, I never saw that man.
Bill: Where is the screenplay and the movie rights and all of that?
Mary Ann: Well, it’s funny that you ask, because the Hollywood ... it ... MGM did not renew their option on it. They changed presidents just as the option was to be renewed, and he canceled all the projects. But I think he would have canceled this one anyway; it was a terrible script that they turned out. But then Oprah Winfrey’s company, Harpo, bought it after that. But that’s ... It’s gone now, as of yesterday. I just found out they are not going to renew the option because they got a terrible script. And evidently that’s the end of it. You know, once the script is written, they don’t want to go through all of that again. So.
Bill: Do you know if she would ... if Oprah has read the novel?
Mary Ann: I should imagine ... I don’t know; I really don’t know. I don’t know.
But I would guess at some point ...
Bill: You would still permit us to come to your home and interview you if you are chosen
to be on Oprah.
Mary Ann: Oh, I think the time for that is long past [laughs]. We will have to wait for the
next one, I’m afraid [laughs]. Or the one after that.
Bill: Back to the novel and Ruth and Ona and where they lived and their daily life and
all of that—did you draw on neighbors?
Mary Ann: Yes. Yes, I did. I drew on my own experience a lot, and then my mother—the way that she lived. But basically it was ... You know, around here there are just so many of these wonderful old women who are just so utterly self-sufficient, and—you know, I guess country women all over are that way—but it just seems like at the, you know, at the end of every one of these driveways is some woman who is holding the, you know, holding the fort somehow.
Bill: Are they disappearing?
Mary Ann: Oh yeah. Yeah, the country itself is disappearing around here. You know,
the Toyota plant has made just an enormous impact on this neck of the woods; and I think, you know, a lot of places the drama is that some old parent is living out her or his last days on the farm before their children subdivide it. So I think that there are fewer. And of course, a lot of the women that I, that I started out looking at have died, you know, in the last 15 years. So ...
Bill: So, not in this order, you had Carrie ...
Mary Ann: Yeah.
Bill: ... and you imagined Cap, and you had talked and thought ... You had Ruth and Ona. And then ...
Mary Ann: I guess I had them first.
Bill: Somewhere in there you knew that Carrie Marie had to go through this traumatic experience. How did you come to think that it was going to be the greatest loss—one of the greatest losses, certainly—a parent can go through: the death of a child? How difficult was that for you?
Mary Ann: Well, it was difficult to come up to it and conceive it and imagine it. Certainly, you know ... I mean, it was very ... I mean, it’s just full of pain in, you know, the prospect of it; and though I have no children of my own, I certainly have dear baby friends, you know. And the idea of the death of a child is just horrifying to me, as it is to a lot of—OK, everybody. But it was funny because, once I had encompassed it imaginatively, then I don’t think I felt it so much. It seemed like work I had to do—you know, to make it real; to not betray that experience—and so I think that the pain of the experience was all in the initial aspect of it. And once ... And after that there is just a kind of distance that has to set in so that you can know what you think, so you have to stand outside of yourself and figure out how you go about expressing this; how, you know ... There is another part of your intellect that clicks in. And I don’t think that has to happen for the reader so much, and so I feel that the reader is a lot less protected from that than I am. I felt very ... I’ve really ... What I really was afraid of doing was sentimentalizing the experience and pulling on people’s strings, you know, to make the grief, you know, I wanted. And for that reason, I ... At first I shied away from writing about the child, and I think a lot of people still think that I should have spent more time, you know, writing about the child’s life. But to ... But I don’t ... I don’t think so. I think that I needed to do about as much as I did, and any more than that would have been excessive.
But you know—what do I know?
Bill: Well, you know that these are your characters, and you ...
Mary Ann: Yeah.
Bill: ... knew them well, and much better than the reader.
Mary Ann: Yeah. Well, I just, I wanted the focus to be on the process of grief and the way that she’s stopped from it, essentially, you know, and then has to find another way to express it after that—that section where she is listening for the sound, so ...
Bill: What about the sound? People are curious about that. We talked about that in our own discussion of this. Is that something literal? Is it something concrete? Is it something that, that you researched, that you know people seek? Where did ...
Mary Ann: You know, I can’t ...
Bill: Where did Carrie go to get that?
Mary Ann: Well, I think that where I went to get it was just ... I overheard somebody talking once about a state of meditation where you are listening for the sound of the universe or something like that, you know. And now that you ask me about it, I can remember sitting down in my study against the wall trying to hear it—trying to hear it, and I think I did. I didn’t hear it for a sustained time, but I tried really hard for several days to understand what it was that that woman was talking about when she said that. And it seemed to me to be perfectly plausible, you know, that there is such a thing and that you can hear it.
Bill: So in a sense you were grieving, too.
Mary Ann: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that that sound does not necessarily go with grieving; it just goes with that advanced focus. But it did happen at that time I was grieving, too, because my mother had died very recently. I was ... And it wasn’t hard at all for me to understand the mind of a grieving person, although you know you have to change it around to think about a child. But ...
Bill: That was a difficult time for you?
Mary Ann: Yeah, it was; it was a difficult time for me. And I think that writing the book was a great relief to me, a great help and comfort. And I feel a little bit apologetic—embarrassed—to say that I used my grief for my parent to learn what a parent feels in grief for a child. I’m sure anyone who has lost a child would say this does not cut it. But in fact, you know, lots of grieving ... Lots of mothers who have lost children have written me to tell, to ask me if I have lost a child and to tell me that the book had ... And that was, you know, to me, that was the best thing that happened about this book.
Well, it was just such a relief to—for one thing, to think that I had been able to speak for those people, but also that I, that I found words for myself.
Bill: If you can, recall for us the process that you went through when Carrie Marie took her fiddle to the, to the cabin.
Mary Ann: Well, you know, before I wrote that section, I had spent about a year going up one wrong avenue after another, trying to find a way out of this book. I just could not find my way through it. I was, you know I took up ... slides in a big way. I considered having her go off with Ruth to the Holy Land. You know, I just hadn’t a clue what I was going to do, and it seemed to me that her conflict, her dramatic situation, finally almost had to be solved interiorly, almost had to be solved metaphorically—almost, because there is no solution that doesn’t take 40 years for a person who is recuperating from that kind of loss—and there was a cabin that was down in the hollow, which is now gone; but I used to go there quite frequently, you know—all the time I have lived here. And I had a very strong sense that there were presences—I never saw a ghost; I have always wanted to, but I never did—but anyway, it occurred to me that she should go there; that that would be the place for her to go, especially since it was the place associated with earlier memories. And so when I got there, when I got to that place in the manuscript, it was like I knew just what to do. It was just like I was overtaken by something. And when I finally got to the point where the ghost of the little lady, the woman who had lived there, comes to her—when the children’s ghosts disappear and that ghost comes—I saw that. And I went out for a walk at one time—I had been writing early in the morning—and I went out for about a half an hour, you know, after I had worked. And that song that she keeps hearing came to me—just, you know, I just heard it; and that’s about as psychic an experience as I have ever had. And you know, you feel sometimes if you, if you do your work, then something fine will be given to you; and that, that was given to me. I mean, I was just a scribe for that.
Bill: Was there ever a thought that it was—that it might be too unreal to ...
Mary Ann: No, not ... No, it didn’t occur to me. You know, I just ... You know, well, people are going to have to believe in ghosts to believe this, or believe, or to suspend their disbelief in that, or to understand. I mean, I think it’s not clear in the writing, in the rendering of it, whether it’s just her hallucination or a real ghost, you know. It could be either, you know. I mean, I ... That’s to say, you know, that whatever it is, that’s a projection of her own psychic stage at the moment. And in that ... No, I don’t think it’s unreal. You know, it may strike some as unreal, but to me it was utterly real.
Bill: Was it difficult for you to conclude with Carrie’s decision. Was that up in the air for a long time? Did you ...
Mary Ann: Is it ... OK. Anyway, what was hard for me to write, and what I ... You know that when I said that I’d spent a year going up all these wrong alleys, the thing that I was debating was that conversation that they have in the, in the backyard when it’s about to rain. And she is utterly fierce in that scene, and she doesn’t let him get away with anything. I did not want to write that scene. I didn’t want to think ... And once that was written, the rest of the book was like, you know, like giving birth or something—you know, it just slid on out. But that, that scene ... I mean, I had to hold my own feet to the fire in order to write that, and at the end that seemed to me to be the perfect place to leave it. I mean, a lot of people, I think, have been disappointed that they don’t have an ... you know, an ending where they—you know, where they get together finally. But I think it’s entirely up to that guy if he can come ... If he can prove he’s OK, she’ll have him; but if he can’t, if he doesn’t ... I mean, it’s all still ... That part of it is still up in the air; but what isn’t up in the air is that she’s all right with herself. To me, you know ... I suppose I shouldn’t say that—I mean, it’s whatever it is to anybody—but it satisfied me, I’ll say.
Bill: Let me read a question that one of our wonderful contributors to our discussion group—and to our whole effort at KET with the bookclub—wrote. He asks: How would you feel if you found out that today, years after she left Ona’s farm and went back to her day job in Lexington, Carrie is no longer playing music but is instead a suburban soccer mom doing contract work for a computer firm? And we might also add, as we were driving out, that Cap is in the den having a beer watching a football game.
Mary Ann: It will never happen.
Liz: [laughs]
Mary Ann: It will never happen—not with that woman; it just won’t happen. She may be lonely; she may be hard-pressed; she may never find the right man for her; but she is going to be playing music. I am absolutely convinced of that. I don’t know about Cap—he could be in the den of somebody’s, you know, somebody’s suburban house—but it won’t be Carrie’s. She won’t have him unless he goes on playing the music, for one thing, I don’t think. But I can just say that. I know that that’s true.
Bill: I was going to say she might end up being a member of the Dixie Chicks today.
Mary Ann: Yeah, you know ...
Bill: Or some ...
Mary Ann: [laughs] Well, she might ... You know, I can conceive of her having an all-girl band again or something like that, but ...
Bill: You invented that all-girl band ...
Mary Ann: Yeah. Right.
Bill: ... before there were all-girl bands, more than likely.
Mary Ann: Yeah. Well, there were a couple.
Bill: That’s pretty neat.
Mary Ann: There were a couple. I mean, there were ... The New Coon Creek Girls are there, and the, our own Reel World String Band are two examples that leap to mind immediately. But I was amazed when I started looking at bluegrass music what a handy, handy vehicle it was for talking about women in the arts.
And I loved doing that part of it, you know; it just filled me with glee [laughs], but I ... And people have said that, that it’s a very accurate take on the sexism of the bluegrass world, which is notoriously that way, you know.
Bill: You know that, that I was going to ...
Mary Ann: It was like a last stronghold—and a very easy mark, in a way, if you want to take aim at something.
Bill: So in some ways ... Someone also wanted us to ask: Is this a woman’s novel or a feminist novel? I didn’t think so, quite frankly.
Quite personally, I didn’t. I did not until somebody posed that question.
Mary Ann: Ahhhh ... [laughs]
Bill: But also Terry asked ... you asked ... if it’s a woman’s novel. And Terry just said: Is there a feminine, feminist take on it? Do you think Molly Snow is a feminist novel? Do you think of yourself as a feminist writer?
Mary Ann: I think that the book is a feminist novel, and I think of myself as a feminist, if, you know, you mean by that that I’m interested in the ways that women historically have had to, you know, have their voices heard, and the way that they continue to struggle. I don’t think it’s a woman’s novel. I mean, I know a lot of men who have read the novel. And I remember being introduced once, you know, and they said, “This is a woman’s novel.” And I really didn’t ... I didn’t, you know ... I didn’t want to take issue with that, but I wanted to say, “No, no, no, guys; don’t go away,” you know [laughs].
Bill: No, I don’t think so.
Mary Ann: I think that it’s fair, you know. I don’t ... And I don’t think that it’s describing only a woman’s experience, either. I think—or if it is, it’s doing it within a whole context. And so I guess, you know ... I don’t ... I hope it’s not a woman’s novel, but I hope it is a feminist novel.
Bill: Tell us what you are doing now, what you’re writing. What can we look for next?
Mary Ann: Well, Sarabande Press in Louisville—do you know that press?—is going to bring out a collection of my short stories in ... It’s coming out in December or January—I’m not sure when. It’s called How She Knows What She Knows About Yo-Yos.
Bill: Oh.
Mary Ann: Envision myself saying that over and over and over again for the next two years [laughs].
Bill: How many short stories have you written?
Mary Ann: I guess I have written about a dozen altogether. This is five very long stories; it’s little tiny novels. And I’m working on another novel now, and it’s the novel that I was working on when I first came to Kentucky, which I finished before I started Come and Go, Molly Snow. And I’m ... I have reconceived that book in major ways, so it’s not even like a revision anymore; it’s a total rewriting with a couple of ...
Bill: Can you give us a hint?
Mary Ann: Of what it ...
Bill: What it’s about.
Mary Ann: It’s separating into two novels. It was ... It was 800 pages long. It was completely impractical as a, you know, as a first novel. I couldn’t get it published. But it represented all of my life as an artist, you know, and all my writing. It was a real blow to me that it, you know, it came close but it just ... It was just too much of a hazard, I guess. And it really needed not to be published, but now ... It’s about a Kentucky woman who is a New York artist ...
Bill: Hmmm.
Mary Ann: ... painter, and whose mother was also a painter living in Kentucky, and who died when the main character was a small, young girl—so Come and Go, Molly Snow in reverse. That’s about all I can say about it. And I don’t know what the other novel is about. It’s about ... It takes place in England, but I don’t know what it’s about exactly.
Liz: I just have this one question: You ... When you talk about writing and you say things like, “I don’t know what it’s about” or even “This came to me,” it sounds like when you do some of your writing, you ... Somebody, something, is traveling through you to the page. Is that what you feel?
Mary Ann: Yes. More and more I feel that way. I think that that’s, you know, when you have that kind of ... Let’s see: I think that, that this strong, strongest, particularly novelists or—and also poets, I guess—must have some sort of connection with a voice that close that they become the instrument of. I don’t think that ... I don’t think Faulkner or Conrad or Tolstoy, for instance, would have been able to write as much as they did without that vision. I don’t know what it is—whether it is a voice or vision—that they are, you know ... that, that they see. I feel some ... you know, like you’re, you know, a kite with a key at the bottom on it that you are bringing electricity down through you. But I think you have to, you know, you have to really serve a long apprenticeship before you get to that stage. And I think that to say that is also to say ... I mean, I think that that’s what a writer’s block is: your ... that voice that comes down through you sort of hitting a dam or something and of whatever it is—fear or lack of confidence. And so you feel always that you are having to hold that other—that voice that wants to be free—in check, you know, always having to bear down a critical opinion of what it is that you are producing. And as ... I mean, I still have that—I think every writer does—but I’m getting ... I’m certainly ... This book came to me; I mean, it was ... I did a lot of the ground—of the breaking, you know, clearing the channel—but then, you know, then the book came to me. So for better or worse, that’s what happened; and I think at some time while I was writing that book, I started thinking of the phrase “path of least resistance,” and that began to seem to me to be my mantra, you know—that every time I hit resistance, it was because I wasn’t going the right way, you know.
And so I ... You know, it was a meandering path to, you know, to just go where that spirit wanted me to go. I don’t ... I don’t mind ... I don’t want to talk too mystically about that, but I think that there is, there is a real energy for you, for you personally, that you can connect with. [laughs]
Liz: So one of the things we always ask about is, what advice you would give young writers? And I’m assuming that’s the advice you would give them.
Mary Ann: Yeah—to try not to be too critical. I think that my ... In my own life, I probably lost about 20 years of my writing life by being frightened that what I was doing wasn’t good enough. And I think it’s very important early on simply to accept yourself as an artist—say, “Hey, this is what I am, and this is what I’m supposed to be doing, and I’ll do it as well as I can; and if they don’t like it, that isn’t my problem, you know.
Liz: [laughs]
Mary Ann: [laughs] You know, this is what I can do. And I think that there are a lot of young writers who have a much more ... who have a whole lot more of an attitude in their early work and who are very confident—probably overly confident. But most young writers that I know are almost stalked by terror, and I just think you have to speak to that terror all the time until you tell it that it’s not your friend. It’s not going to get you anywhere; it’s going to keep you from getting anywhere.
Liz: OK.
Bill: Well, thank you so much for spending this time with us.
Liz: Yeah.
Mary Ann: You are welcome. Now what are you going to do? [laughs] You have to transcribe this whole thing.
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