The cravings of pregnant women are a staple of folk wisdom and jokes. The cravings are often for odd combinations -- pickles and ice cream, strawberry omelets, roast beef and blueberry sandwiches. When I was pregnant I lost my taste for coffee and even for almonds but began to crave fiction.

I have always been a reader. I had a library card as soon as I could write my name, and I read my way through all the childhood classics -- Little Women, Black Beauty, Heidi. I can recite verbatim Eleanor Estes's The Hundred Dresses. I read the series books --The Bobbsey Twins, The Dana Girls, Nancy Drew. I read all the volumes in the Childhoods of Famous Americans line. I read the teenage romances of the day -- Janet Lambert's books, Maureen Daly's. In high school I graduated to classic adult works -- Anna Karenina, War and Peace. I still have the Signet paperback edition of Dostoevsky's The Possessed that I bought with my last dollar on a snowy Friday in December of 1967 because the young man referred to in yesterday's piece told me it was the best book he'd ever read.

And then I graduated from college and suddenly stopped reading fiction. I still read, but I read history, psychology, popular science, feminist philosophy, literary criticism, biography.

In January of 1985, not long after I learned I was pregnant, I visited the pubic library that serves my area. I think I was looking for books on pregnancy and childbirth, but I left with an armload of fiction. I read through the sticky summer of my pregnancy, and I read while I nursed. I read aloud sometimes because Lynn seemed to like the sound of my voice. I read children's classics and contemporary fiction.

I went back to work when Lynn was a year old, and I felt like Rip van Winkle. While I was gone, word processing had come to my classroom. Suddenly I could write almost as fast as I could think, and with the magic of cut and paste and find and replace I could change things at will and always have a clean copy, printed out only if I so desired it. And I began to write again.

Three years ago, in an early piece for this space, I wrote a brief history of my writing career. I wrote:

"My earliest memory of trying to establish myself as an author comes from about fourth grade. I'd read Little Women and identified with Jo. I even set up a kind of study in our attic, an unheated, partially finished low-ceilinged space that had a dormer window. I retreated there after my mother, who'd found me hunched over paper and pencil in a corner of the dining room, said to my father in a voice dripping with derision, 'She's writing a story.' ...

"By the end of my college days I had abandoned creative writing for what Peter Elbow calls 'writing by committee' -- academic research papers, student evaluations, purchase order justifications. I kept a personal journal only irregularly, usually abandoning it because what I was writing was not honest and I didn't have the emotional freedom to write authentically."

This summer I visited that room in Concord, Massachusetts where Louisa May Alcott created Jo, said to be the March sister most like herself. It was on that trip that I regained the determination to work more seriously than ever before on writing fiction, and it was then that I envisioned the trip I have now undertaken.

I'm in Wernersville, a town just west of Reading, Pennsylvania. My base of operations is the The Jesuit Center for Spiritual Growth, about as close as I'll ever come to holing up in a cabin in Montana or Wyoming or even Yaddo, places where some of my favorite authors claim they've done their best work. I am afforded extraordinary hospitality here, and have been since I first visited twenty years ago and found the story I've been saying I want to write.

So now here I am, alone, no obligations to family, no distractions or interruptions. Last night it all seemed so possible. I looked through my assembled materials and thought, it's really all there -- characters, things for them to do, moral or psychological dilemmas to explore. In fact, I have so much that I think I could go without another idea for the rest of my life and have enough material (in size anyway) for a sizeable body of work. The task before me is to just dive in.

But first, a walk on a windless winter day in Hain's Cemetery.