ALICE WALKER: No. [laughter] M.J.: Do you remember why you wrote it, or why you started to write? A.W.: I think I started to write because I was in love with the feel of pen on paper, or pencil on paper, and that it was something that I could do in solitude, and it was something that seemed to feed me as a little child. M.J.: You were the youngest of eight. A.W.: I was the youngest of eight. M.J.: So solitude— A.W.: Was hard to find. [laughter] And very much something I loved. M.J.: And where did you find—where did you write? Where did you go off? A.W.: I went off behind the house. Well, actually, there’s a story that my mother told. She said that when I was crawling, she would look for me, because apparently, you know, I had a way of getting away from them, and she would look for me, and I would have crawled to the back of the house and I would be writing in the sand with a twig or in the margins of a Sears, Roebuck catalog, and I think she said that that was, as far as she was concerned, that was my beginning as a writer.
