…the rhythms of the Old and New Testament, the King James version, are just as solidly set in a person of my era who went to church as a moral foundation. I make sentences, I’m sure, from Biblical rhythms. I’ve been called post-Modernist but I doubt it. I think I just write in more fragmented ways and narration. But the base of my sentences, although they are sometimes Baroque, is I think from the Scriptures as far as I can feel it myself.

We read a lot of the Bible. We knew Scriptures by heart, especially Psalms and a great bit of the Book of John, the Sermon on the Mount, and - from Matthew and certain things like that were memorized. And I had them memorized until I was 15-16 years old…

…something like the 23 Psalm. The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow and so on. But this had just a such wonderful basic human poetry in it. And I never was sophisticated enough to consider the Bible as literature until I was - I never even heard the term the Bible as literature until I was way into graduate school. So I - in fact, I’d stopped going to church. But the church is - the Scriptures are very much with me and more and more now I’m reading Mark and John in the Bible. Not all the time but I just love the clarity and the mystery at the same time.

“The clarity and the mystery.” I like that. Whether you leave it behind or not, if The Bible was once a part of your life, it never goes away. I can still recite Bible passages from my youth…