A Conversation with Diana Hume George

Although it's late in the day, noted writer and poet Diana Hume George appears rested when we meet for an interview. In fact, she looks years younger than her body of work suggests, and her energy and enthusiasm for the craft of writing are evident as we speak of creative nonfiction and poetry, mentors and families. We also discuss her unusual home; once a Lutheran church, the tall structure is situated in the hills of northern Pennsylvania and boasts soaring ceilings and wide open rooms, shot through with color filtering in from the stained glass windows. Her writing space, a cozy nook built into the old choir loft, is the stuff dreams are made of. I ask first about this room.

KELLY BRECHER KING: What is it like to work in such a place, and how did you come to live here?

DIANA HUME GEORGE: To answer that I should tell you about the loft, it's what my writer friend Linda McWilliams calls my "aerie," since it's up in the top bell-tower area of our church. This is the place where I can now go to escape the phone and e-mail without turning them off or displacing everyone else. This nineteenth-century Lutheran church that my partner John Edwards had the stunning good sense to buy years ago is wonderful, but it has no separate rooms. It's open and soaring, but that means no boundaries. No sanctuary in the sanctuary. So John built me a three-tiered loft with doors on it, doors that close, and since he knows how to build things—as well as being a fellow writer who understands what I need—he also made it beautiful.

KBK: What is your writing process? What's a typical writing day like?

DHG: What is it like or what do I wish it were like? That's really an important distinction. I want my telling the truth here to be helpful to other writers who don't live up to the ideal. You know the drill—writing every day no matter what, and how that's what a real writer does, she has to have discipline, a real writer writes all the time. So I want to say I get up early every single day, well before dawn, and after I do my sitting meditation session, I write for several hours before breakfast, and then after my fresh squeezed vegetable juice and my plump fruits and fibers I do my yoga, and then return to the studio for another two or three hours, followed by a light macrobiotic lunch—oh god, I am making myself sick with envy, or just plain sick.

The fact is, I write when I can. Sometimes it's five days in a row all energized and on fire and caffeined up, and then maybe two weeks when there's no chance at all—or three weeks or three months. But then suddenly I have to write or I'll get mean, so I make vows and unplug phones and turn off e-mail. Maybe that works for a day or two or three, but then someone I love is in real need and I can't say no, or at least I don't—it's part of what being my family's matriarch means.

KBK: You've told me that you sometimes simply can't write at home. What do you do when that's the case?

DHG: I create writing retreats for myself. I never was one to go to organized retreats—too many free-floating egos in the air. I often can't write if there's another consciousness near me, even if that consciousness is downstairs and very quiet. My lake cottage has been my favorite writing place in the past, but in recent years it's where extended family come and often as...