Just One Thing with Elizabeth Burton

Elizabeth Burton’s December issue memoir “Dictionary Entry, Bear: For the Girl Who Killed My Father” is a heart-rending revelation in definitions. Here she shares just one thing about the piece:

“I had been trying to find a way to write about my father's death and my obsession with the girl who killed him for a long time. This past summer, in a residency with poet Ellen Hagen through the Kentucky Foundation for Women, something just clicked and this piece came out, as if it were a gift. Ideas have to compost as long as they need to, and sometimes, that's a long time (in my case, twenty years). As writers, we should all learn to be patient with ourselves; often, we have to wait to write from our scars instead of our wounds.”