Ann Packer discusses her most recent novel The Children's Crusade, artistic mothers, the writer and her “first principle,” and the fight to like your own characters.
Feathers are a gift and flexible protein. Mom put down tobacco and ran her fingers over its exposed parts. She told me the salmon run is coming and this bird would have wanted for nothing.
Summer works like this. Every day small moments cycle like waves within tides, eroding our opportunities on a geological scale invisible from our point of immersion.
It has been fifteen years, but I can still remember every moment of that year. It is cased in a vitrine, and the things I see through the wavy plexiglass are indistinct and as odd as that car going the wrong way on the parking garage ramp.
1964, a month prior to the anniversary of JFK’s assassination, a different home movie shot. Infant toss. Up-down. Plummeting. I’m ten months of age—picking up speed.
New motherhood: it’s common but totally strange, completely natural yet weirdly alien, a beautiful miracle and absolutely disgusting. It can also have some strong effects on a woman’s perception of…