What Stillness Taught Me About Story

By Mary Monoky

I didn’t set out to write a story. I set out to survive.

After decades of illness, raising four children, and uncertainty, I moved seven hundred miles from suburban Philadelphia to a small town in the South. My oldest son had just gotten married and asked me to come. Not out of obligation—out of love. It was a quiet, astonishing invitation: “I want you here.”

In that new town, with my body still fragile and my identity in flux, I returned to school. I finished a Master...