Stuart Dybek

I recalled the afternoon when the two of us stood beating erasers, and Camille confided that she'd done penance for stories - stories that I'll never know if she wrote or only imagined writing. She'd wanted me to tell her a secret from my dreams, a secret from my dreams I hadn't had as yet, and so I didn't quite understand what she was after."It's about feeling," Camille had insisted.I didn't understand then that she was talking about risk.

The public library is where place and possibility meet.

Sometimes, in a tight game with runners on, digging in at short, ready to break with the ball, a peace I'd never felt before would paralyze the diamond. For a moment of eternal stillness I felt as if I were cocked at the very heart of the Midwest.

Our plans for the future made us laugh and feel close, but those same plans somehow made anything more than temporary between us seem impossible. It was the first time I__ ever had the feeling of missing someone I was still with.

Rather than feeling that every moment you__e got to exert this enormous control, you can take the attitude that your job as a writer is not to control everything, but to set things in motion.

What art does is give us the refinement, all the shades of meaning, of emoting, that we don__ have language for. What fascinates me about that is we__e talking about an art form in which your medium is language. It__ almost a paradox that you__e seeing. I want to give you emotion, that if I just relied on diction, I wouldn__ have language for it.