text:  These stories come from my mom. I write to keep my mom alive. She passed away in 2005, about a year before I published my first short story. And every day I sit down to write, I think of her. And I think of writing as a conversation with her. And since she wanted to be a novelist herself and passed away before she could write that first book, I feel like I'm carrying her legacy and doing my best to honor it. So the women in my book are her.