Also reading some interviews with Ms. Beard and enjoying quite a different type of personality - refreshing in this age when everything is "me, me, me!"
Here are some fragments:
JB: "When I finally sit down, I spend a lot of time trying to sink down into the dream of it and then stay there. It’s like walking on the bottom of the ocean, all these incredible creatures float past, neon and scary, so absorbing, but the surface is always calling." - thedaysofyore
"Interviewer: How do you see the world when you’re not writing it?
JB: As the most beautiful and glorious place imaginable. With woods and birds and turtles and the giant starry sky and nice people and the other kind who aren’t nice but who have their reasons and the raccoon who killed my ducks and now once a night comes up to the infrared camera outside the newly-secure enclosure and stares into the lens with his hair sticking up everywhere.
Interviewer: What are your secret hopes for, say, ten years from now? If you could do anything or have achieved anything? Secret!
JB: Honestly, I just hope to be alive in ten years. If I am, I would like to have written another book, or at least some stories or essays that were good. If I am not, I would like to be in the woods across from my studio, with the birds and the turtles and the photogenic raccoons." freerangenonfiction
