MARJORIE SANDOR: Well, when I was a little kid, I loved to write. And I liked to write stories in which I killed off all my brothers. I had a lot of older brothers, so they were deeply disturbed-- psychologically-- stories.
And I kept writing all the way through high school. I worked on the creative writing magazine that we had. But then when I was a freshman in college, I had a really tremendous teacher. She was a 28-year-old teaching assistant doing her PhD in literature, and she told me that I had something. That I had something special.
But she said, you're going to have to work incredibly hard. And here are five books you should read right now. And she gave me Virginia Woolf and Eudora Welty and E.B. White, Joan Didion-- a number of books, and sent me to get started.
And she really made it clear that it was going to be a long, hard slog. So she didn't exactly say, you have talent. She said, you have something, and you're going to have to work really hard, which I think was important. I didn't get any kind of starry-eyed thing. So I guess that would be the true eureka moment, but writing since a child.