Before the accident, back while I was still on my book tour for Treyf, I wrote the first thirty or so pages of Motherland by hand, on lined note paper. Something I never do, although I heard Dani Shapiro once say that she always starts a new book longhand because word processing programs have a way of making things look more finished than they, early on, have any right to, and there seems to be some sense to that.

I hate writing longhand, but I tried it anyway. I was doing a lot of flying at the time, and I spilled endless cups of cheap, in-flight coffee on my legal pads because the shoulder injury I sustained coming home from a speaking engagement in Chapel Hill necessitates my needing a lot of room to spread out, which, on a plane, you just don’t have.

When I got home, I transferred my pages to a new Microsoft Word document on my old MacBook Pro, and in the process rewrote much of what I had already written, in part because I couldn’t read my own handwriting. The day after the election, I flew out to Minneapolis to teach at The Loft Literary Center and spent two entire days sitting in the cafe attached to The Loft, which is sort of attached to the new (fabulous) Milkweed Bookstore. Another ten or so pages, but this time, written directly on my computer which, sadly, often freezes when I am mid-sentence, and the bouncing ball of doom requires a force quit.