Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful for the loving help and
support of my friends and family during the completion of this
work. I want to thank particularly Carole DeSanti, Joy Johannessen,
Jim Grimsley, Amy Bloom, Jewelle Gomez, Diane Sabin, Sydelle
Kramer, Lillian Lent, and, most of all, Frances Goldin. For any of
them, I would happily climb into a hole and out again.
Joy Johannessen has worked with me as a
thoughtful editor and astute critical reader for more than eight
years, and I have been blessed to have her insights. It was she who
helped me sort the wheat from the chaff in the enormous volume of
raw story from which Cavedweller was drawn—and to do that
she took time from both her work and her family. I am deeply
grateful. Joy is a gifted woman, and I only wish she were a twin so
that there could be more of her work in the world.
When I had run my family into the ground, there
were three sites to which I retreated to work on
Cavedweller—the MacDowell Colony, which helped me realize
all over again that I am too old to run on ice, the La Rose Hotel
in Santa Rosa, California, where they let me spread chapters all
over the floor and hide out for days at a time, and the Sabin-Gomez
home in San Francisco. Every writer should have such nurturing
places to go.
Thank you, all of you.