A painstaking novelist who takes her time with each book, Alice McDermott won the National Book Award for Charming Billy and she has a slew of Pulitzer Prize nominations to her credit. Expressing the joys and travails of what she calls "this mad pursuit," McDermott shares her pithiest wisdom about her chosen art, acquired over a lifetime as a writer and a teacher of writing. Paying tribute to her own inspirations, she also serves throughout as the artful conductor of a literary chorus, quoting generously from the work of Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Nabokov, Morrison, and Woolf, beautifully joining her voice with theirs.