“I am, for the first time in my writing life, consciously taking a break from writing.
By which I mean that I’m not involved in a big creative project just now. I just had a book published, and I have another manuscript that I’m about to shop around, so I’m not ready to dive into something new, if only because I have no ideas at the moment. ‘Sometimes,’ as one of my writer-friends likes to say, ‘you need to let the toilet tank fill up.’ So that's what I’m doing. Sort of. In fact, what’s happened in the last year is that I’ve been so busy that I really haven’t had time to read, but I have had time to listen to books on CD and to listen to podcasts. I’m spending what would be my writing time trying to understand documentary radio, trying to figure out how the narratives on shows like National Public Radio’s This American Life, The Moth Radio Hour, and Radio Diaries function and what they might have to teach me about how I want to construct stories in the future.”
—Debra Spark, author of Good for the Jews (University of Michigan Press, 2009)