Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Courtney Angela Berkich.

She's the author most recently of the Stone Fields and Epitaph for the Living.

She's written a book of short stories as well called Stillness.

Both of the books are published by Faris-Jaus and Cheru.

Originally, Stillness is now available in paperback from Piccadour.

Now, I read that you had begun this memoir, the Stone Fields, and then interrupted it to write

the book of stories.

Can you tell me what that was like since they share the same subject to some extent?

They do.

They have, I think, a very similar subject between them.

And it's sort of an interesting thing I had started with the Stonefields,

which is a nonfiction. It's part memoir, part sort of a reimagined history. So I was in fact able to do

a lot of novel type, fictional type work in it. But I realized at a certain point as I was writing it

that there were a tremendous number of

stories that I wanted to tell that were not fitting into the nonfiction. Somehow the scope of the

nonfiction, it couldn't contain them. A lot of those stories were sort of based on fact,

...