Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old work.

Caroline Gordon has been known as a "writer's writer," one who is greatly respected by her fellow artists for her craft but who has not received popular or even academic acclaim. As I became interested in Gordon's work and began to explore the possibility of a biography, I frequently wondered why Gordon was a "writer's writer," rather than...