What I like about mixing fiction and non-fiction is being able to fully explore an idea without being bound by genre. If you scratch under any surface there are histories for everything, aren't there? And there's unknown women's history in everything, too. It all gets simplified because its complexity is more than you can stand sometimes. So you need full freedom of expression.

Helen Humphreys

Categorized in : Sometimes Complexity Freedom Of Expression

This is what I know about love, That it is tested every day, and what is not renewed is lost. One chooses either to care more or to care less. Once the choice is to care less, then there is no stopping the momentum of goodbye. Each loved thing slips away. There is no stopping it.

Helen Humphreys

lost-ones choices goodbye

Maybe reading was just a way to make her feel less alone, to keep her company. When you read something you are stopped, the moment is stayed, you can sometimes be there more fully than you can in your real life.

Helen Humphreys

real reading way

Grief moves us like love. Grief is love, I suppose. Love as a bac... by Helen Humphreys

Grief moves us like love. Grief is love, I suppose. Love as a backwards glance.

Helen Humphreys

like-love grief moving

The novels are always morphing into something else now, some kind of hybrid, more of a ground that isn't so easily specified. I suppose you could call it creative non-fiction, and rather focused on the natural world, which is what I'm most interested in reading these days. At least that would be the closest thing, but my books also include some fiction, so they're difficult to pinpoint.

Helen Humphreys

creative reading book

Every story is a story about death. But perhaps, if we are lucky, our story about death is also a story about love.

Helen Humphreys

lucky ifs stories

I like being mistaken for someone useful. by Helen Humphreys

I like being mistaken for someone useful.

Helen Humphreys

mistaken

What I've always found interesting in gardens is looking at what people choose to plant there. What they put in. What they leave out. One small choice and then another, and soon there is a mood, an atmosphere, a series of limitations, a world.

Helen Humphreys

garden people interesting

It's easy to feel equal to wanting. It's rare to feel equal to ha... by Helen Humphreys

It's easy to feel equal to wanting. It's rare to feel equal to having.

Helen Humphreys

equal easy inspirational

Love is not a good thing, I've decided. It just makes you afraid you'll lose what you love, and then, because your fear makes a space for that to happen, it does. What's the point?

Helen Humphreys

space doe love-is

There are many different stories to tell. It's never the same. Every day weather blows in and out, alters the surface. Sometimes it is stripped down to a single essential truth, the thing that is always believed, no matter what. The seeds from which the garden has grown.

Helen Humphreys

garden blow weather

In some ways I spend longer at non-fiction because there are a lot of different threads to bring together. But non-fiction is more reflective than immersive. The problem with fiction sometimes is that you have to leave the real world to enter the fictional one. And that takes so much, goes into your head for so long . . . I don't know, I just feel less inclined toward that these days, and more inclined to remain in my own life. I do like really good fiction, but it's getting harder to hold my attention in a novel.

Helen Humphreys

real together long

Memory is a barricade against forgetting; light is a bulwark against darkness; life is a flex against the stillness of the grave. Maybe that's what I'm trying to do here, clear a space in all the debris, through all the anxieties and worries, where I can just exist, easily and simply, entire, for as long as I have left.

Helen Humphreys

space light memories

The heart is a river. The act of writing is the moving water that holds the banks apart, keeps the muscle of words flexing so that the reader can be carried along by this movement. To be given space and the chance to leave one's earthly world. Is there any greater freedom than this?

Helen Humphreys

heart writing moving