Julia Alvarez, on writing:

For me, the writing life doesn't just happen when I sit at the writing desk.

It is a life lived with a centering principle, and mine is this:

that I will pay close attention to this world I find myself in.

'My heart keeps open house,' was the way the poet Theodore Roethke put it in a poem.

And rendering in language what one sees through the opened windows and doors of that house

is a way of bearing witness to the mystery of what it is to be alive in this world.

– Julia Alvarez.