Those words and that image have been useful and continue to surprise me. At that time, in Bozeman, I realized that the writing path required a solitariness and that such solitariness would be its own reward, the way walking in the mountains is its own reward. Both are demanding of body and spirit; you feel as if you might not make it; sometimes you want to turn back out of fear or exhaustion; it's exhilarating to round a corner and see something you've never seen before: a new flower, sunset on glacier ice; and you're warmed by the paradoxical fire of having arrived even as you're still on the journey. You're nowhere and you're exactly where you want to be.

Later, as I lived alone, having taken that teaching job hither, I grew into self-sufficiency, with obsessions and intuitions that if I trusted led me to whatever I'd write next. I thought of that moment with the therapist when an agent said to me about Hummingbird House, "Patricia, nobody's interested in Central America." And again, when I found myself traveling alone in Guatemala to a remote village where no one spoke Spanish or English. And again, when I realized that I needed to go to Vietnam to write In the River Sweet. This writing path has been a joyful solitude - rocky, messy, fraught with nearly too much time and sadness. Too much time because it requires hours of staring-out-the-window, which sometimes feels wasteful. Sadness because I live in memories so much, my own and my characters.

The image of the path returned again when I noticed an element of envy among my students. One would win a prize, the others would talk behind her back, that sort of pettiness. I took to telling them at the beginning of the year, "Don't waste your time on envy. You're on the writing path with all the others who've taken it. There will always be someone ahead of you and someone behind you." I return to the image again as I consider the question of influence. It is as if those writers who have gone before leave cairns - those artfully stacked stones you find in the high country - to guide the way. The cairns -- the books you love -- give you permission as a writer. Yes, you can try this, they whisper. Go down this way, if you dare. As a girl, I read indiscriminately, constantly, from The Secret Garden to my father's detective novels with their salacious covers to Marjorie Morningstar. Reading was a private, sensual pleasure - the only pleasure in an otherwise rough life - and I carried a book with me everywhere. Around the impressionable age of twenty, I decided life was too short to read junk, and I began my writer's education. I was enamored of Hemingway, Bernard Malamud, I. B. Singer.

I still find it thrilling to read the opening and ending of For Whom the Bell Tolls. There's Robert Jordan, lying flat on the pine needle floor of the forest. I like the simplicity of the language. And yet, what a complicated task it must have been to write this book, set in another country, dealing with the politics of another country. It is a story with international scope and the horror of war, but also manages sexiness, tenderness. This book taught me that even in times of war, people are falling in love. It gave me permission to look under the war experience to the human experiences that go on no matter what. And then there is the example of Hemingway himself, his willingness to put himself in harm's way. He was wounded in Italy. I have to admit, silly as it might seem, that I like seeing my books on bookstore shelves on the same row with his, rubbing shoulders, as it were, with one of my heroes, although from what we know of Hemingway's attitude toward women he might have preferred me adoringly at his feet.

The Fixer by Bernard Malamud taught me to take religion seriously as a force in my life. I grew up in a household divided by religion; my mother's family was Protestant and my father's was Catholic. This caused no end of tension until my mother converted to Catholicism when I was ten years old. I was baptized and received my first communion in the same year. My mother was deeply troubled by mental illness, and religion frequently played a starring role in her breakdowns. She would sit at the kitchen table, a glass of Mogen David in hand, and ruminate about Israel, the Gospels and the end of the world, compassion, and sorrow. On the other side of the sanity divide were the nuns whose classes I attended from grade four through grade eight, beacons of reason and order. My maternal grandmother would attend Protestant tent revivals across the railroad tracks from the Dairy Queen and sometimes I went with her. The minister would rail against short skirts and the music of the devil, Elvis and company - all of which I loved. Such was the religious stew I simmered in as a child. In my late teens I rejected it all, but within a decade The Fixer made me see that it wasn?t so easy for Jakov Bok to cross the river, tossing his prayer things into the water, thinking he could reject his Judaism and his religious training. Throughout The Fixer Jakov Bok wrestles with his identity as a Jew, just as I have struggled with the Church and its sexism and homophobia, with dogma, with the Gospels. Writing both Hummingbird House and In the River Sweet provided me with venues for that struggle.

In 1996 the writer Susan Neville invited me to write an essay for an anthology about religion in Indiana. I immediately said I wanted to write about the Buddhist-Catholic dialogue, thinking to myself, "I'll never find that in Indiana." I began nosing around, asking Don Mitchell, a colleague at Purdue in the philosophy department, if he could give me any leads. He introduced me to Sister Meg Funk at Our Lady of Grace Monastery in Beech Grove, Indiana, and she thought my phone call serendipitous. Dr. Norbhu, the Dalai Lama's brother, was scheduled to participate in Benedictine vespers the following week. I arrived at Our Lady of Grace with a feeling of going home because when I pulled into the gravel drive I recognized the place. I'd been there as a girl, to sing in a choir event. Sister Meg walked me down a hallway where color photos of the Dalai Lama hung. The photos had been taken at a gathering at a monastery in Kentucky, Gethsemane, the home of the American mystic, Thomas Merton, and monks and nuns from both traditions, Buddhist and Catholic, had gathered there to meditate together. I was moved by these photos, this reaching out by the Benedictines beyond the safe boundaries of religious exclusivity. Dr. Norbhu's contribution to vespers was a relief, like water when you're thirsty, including all sentient beings in the blessing.