The morning my life changed, I was sitting in a cafe talking to a student at a writers conference in Southampton. My phone rang, but I didn’t answer it. When the student left, I saw the missed call was from a woman I had worked with on a task force on housing affordability in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, where I live.
Our kids were the same age, and my daughter used to go to her house for ACT prep classes. That’s the kind of town Swarthmore is: small enough that you often know people a couple of different ways. When I called Beth back, she too was sitting in a cafe, looking across one of Swarthmore’s main streets at a building she’d just learned was for sale.
I should tell you that Swarthmore is a very small town. There are only about 7,000 residents, including the students at the local college. We do support a coffee shop, a pizza parlor, and a small grocery store, but just barely.
Were we big enough for a bookstore? Still, I didn’t hesitate. What was Swarthmore becoming, and was it the sort of place I would still want to live?
For a while before that phone call, I’d been waiting to see what the universe might offer me. The teaching I’d been doing was starting to dry up, and also, I was feeling I had less to offer as a teacher. Who knows what makes a work of fiction good or bad, let alone more or less likely to be published?
There was a time when I thought I did, but over the years I’d grown less confident in my own clarity. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, but I do think it makes it hard to teach. More importantly, having spent decades doing my novelist’s work alone in a room, I had grown restless.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
