Sue Miller

Do we writers need to shed our bathrobes, get dressed at last and shuffle blinking out of our studies into the bright light of day, find jobs as laborers or insurance executives or physicians or models or pimps in order to have something wilder, something more exciting, something more relevant to contemporary life to write about?

Surely not. Surely the writer's job is to make relevant the world she wishes to write about. How? By writing well and carefully and powerfully. By using humor, as Cheever did; or violence, as O'Connor did; or rue, as Chekhov did, to make the territory of her imagination compelling and somehow universal. And that holds true whether the territory of the imagination is close to the literal truth of her life or far from it.

-Sue Miller