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" In general, I think people are worried about saying the wrong thing to any grieving person. On a very basic level, I think they're frightened of touching off tears or sorrow, as though someone tearing up at the mention of unhappy news would be the mentioner's fault. "

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" In the last century, I earned my living as a librarian, and I loved it. I'd have to take some classes to get up to speed with 21st-century librarianship. "

Elizabeth McCracken

Last

Living

" I sort of don't believe in closure. In the sense that it doesn't make me feel better to think that something is over. "

" My mother's family didn't speak much about Europe: My mother was born in 1935, and her new-world parents were the sort who didn't want to worry their children about the war. "

" Some graphic narrative art presses against the panel: you wrestle with it at the level of the paper. "

" The walls of the Franciscan Church of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin Mary were ruined stucco chipping away from the brick underneath, with ghostly frescoes, concrete-filled niches, and one complete, vivid crucifix painted over the altar. "

" I always want the last line to be really good, which may sound silly, but I want it to be a last pleasing line. "

" It's an amazing thing to watch a lizard fold a moth into its mouth, like a sword swallower who specialises in umbrellas. "

Elizabeth McCracken

Mouth

Sword

" I have a memory of my fourth-grade self wanting to be the first woman president of the United States, but I think that has a lot more to do with my love of world records and reference books than a love of serving my country. "

" I am not a therapy person, but I understand what therapy does. It's a way of translating dark thoughts into something manageable. "

" I own an e-reader, but I use it almost exclusively to read things that aren't books - student theses, unbound galleys. "

" I wanted to acknowledge that life goes on but that death goes on, too. A person who is dead is a long, long story. "

" A comic strip that your parents read when they were young is a curious thing: it's an heirloom, and it's also intimate. You peer through windows and look at the things that made your elders laugh, and then you wonder whether the laugh really belongs to you. "

" Acknowledgment of grief - well, it makes feeling the grief easier, not harder. "

" Humor reminds you, when you're flattened by sorrow, that you're still human. "

" I'm astounded by people who can listen to music when they write. I can only assume that they have multi-track brains, while mine is decidedly single. "

" Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it. "

" When I first met my husband, he was sculpting Vilnius out of clay - a sort of Vilnius, anyhow: a map of an imaginary European city based on the Lithuanian capital - to illustrate his second novel. "

" Life likes jokes; life is constantly making jokes, even at the most inopportune moments. "

" When it comes to other people's writing, my older influences are more powerful than more recent ones, partially because I'm now more worried that I'll suddenly accidentally steal something from another writer. "

" I used to be a writer with superstitions worthy of a professional baseball player: I needed a certain desk chair and a certain armchair and a certain desk arrangement, and I could only get really useful work done between 8 P.M. and 3 A.M. Then I started to move, and I couldn't bring my chairs with me. "

" When you've lost a baby, everyone around you expects you to be fine once the new baby is born, as though that somehow takes away the pain of losing the first child. I needed to express how wrong that was. "

" Sadness was something I was thinking about in my life outside of writing, so it wormed itself into whatever I wrote. "

" The thing that most interests me about writing - there are lots of things, but the thing I can't do without - is the hit of happiness a lovely sentence delivers. "

Elizabeth McCracken

Writing

Without

" An iron lung looks like an enormous metal coffin or a 19th-century rocket ship: only its occupant's head is left outside, a tight seal around the neck. "

" I'm a higgledy-piggledy person in every way. On days that I work, I work for eight hours in a row, with my internet access entirely turned off, locked in my office. "

" For about half an hour in mid-1992, I knew as much as any layperson about the pleasures of remote access of other people's computers. "

" I feel like I don't understand time in novels, really. I bumble forward, is all. "

Elizabeth McCracken

Forward

Feel

" Tweeting about objects means I don't need to bid on them, which is a blessing. Buying something is a way of saying, 'Look at this!' So is tweeting. So, I guess, is writing fiction. "

" I work in my office on the campus of the University of Texas. It's the sort of place described as 'book-lined', but it's recently tipped over into 'fire-hazard' territory. "

" When I was in college, I wrote poetry very seriously, and then once I had started writing short stories, I didn't go back to poetry, partially because I felt like I understood how incredibly difficult it was. "