Helena Writes

Soft-edged and dreamy, on a deeper brown neutral ground, so that the beauty of orange, with its green tones and reds, its yellows and lavender grays, is revealed. The image captivated me...

My older sister, Jolene, was the ringleader in our sister group. It was a group of only us two...We were an organism. Where did she stop and I begin? I can't find a fixed edge...

Children's stories with an accumulation, or a great multiplicity of something as its central theme and/or structure, go back to books written before I was a child...

I often mention to students what I call “The Writer’s Palette.” I call it that because I was a painter before I wrote. Most of my parallels come from painting...

My dad whistled. Cheer was part of his nature. He whistled around the house and in the car, and sometimes he sang.

It was the feeling under my father’s words that recorded itself in me. My father’s feeling was, then, and is now, my ground. Not his feelings. But his Feeling. The world of his feeling that included the cosmos...

We step onto firm ground when Marilyn gets to the thing that is waiting, underneath everything she says, the thing she can't forget. Right there, in the middle of the air, we're standing on something solid.

When I had my own children I moved to Long Island. In the summer, I felt nostalgia, trapped in the airless frenzy of traffic, the earth paved over, asphalt heat waves, car exhaust. I dreamed of moving to the country, but didn’t see how I could uproot. I wished it would happen miraculously. Then it did.

They are migrants. Their lives were saved. They came to a new place and added such beauty, a yellow different from the broom plants, the evening primrose, the Gloriosa lilies, Stella D’oros, the pale yellow lilies, names unknown to me, and the tiny yellow flowering ground cover, another gift of this place to me—its name also unknown. A shimmering time of yellows, the beginning of July...

Life is a relay race One passes the necessary tasks to the Next One... And we open our hands to receive them, those necessary tasks. We open our hands to touch the world—however we can.