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" Ordinarily, I'd claim that I'd never write directly about my children, but the opening conversation of 'Peter Elroy' is a verbatim conversation that my children had that I just loved: morbid, funny, passionate, and obsessed with the truth of things - all natural qualities of children that I'd like my work to contain. "

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" 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. "

Elizabeth McCracken

Back

College

Poetry

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In library science school, back in the years of glowing green non-graphical screens and protocols called Archie and Veronica, I wrote Internet documentation. "

" There was a time in my life when I wasn't sure I'd ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person's form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress. "

" In 'Property,' none of the characters are based on any real people, but the house is very much the house that I moved into in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" New Orleans is still the place where you find out that you have a doppelganger and feel lucky - but somehow unsurprised - to learn that his name is Mad Bottom. "

" 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

" Vilnius was once known as 'The Jerusalem of Lithuania' because of the number of prayer houses and scholars there; in the first half of the 20th century, it became a center of Yiddish-language scholarship. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When I tell people there are three stories in 'Thunderstruck' that were from the same wrecked novel, they want to guess what they are. Nobody has. There are no characters or timelines in common. They're structured very differently. A good novel wouldn't have pulled apart so easily. "

" 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. "

" 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'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. "

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

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

" There were a lot of things I loved about working in a library, but mostly I miss the library patrons. I love books, but books are everywhere. Library patrons are as various and oddball and democratic as library books. "

" I can't imagine not joking even at the worst of times. And for me, it's sort of automatic. "

Elizabeth McCracken

Even

Sort

" I've always been absolutely appalling about the future, but I sort of think that was my childhood religion. We were future deniers. You did your best in the present, which was all around you. "

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

" 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. "

" 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