“For me the research that underlies the writing is the best part of the scribbling game. . . . On Jumbly shelves in my house I can find directions for replacing a broken pipe stem, a history of corn cribs, a booklet of Spam recipes, a 1925 copy of Animal Heroes of the Great War (mostly dogs but some camels); dictionaries of slang, dialect and regional English. . . . This digging involves more than books. I need to know which mushrooms smell like maraschino cherries and which like dead rats, to note that a magpie in flight briefly resembles a wooden spoon, to recognize vertically trapped suppressed lee-wave clouds; so much of this research is concerned with four dimensional observation and notation.” ~ Annie Proulx