BIOGRAPHY Devoto was born and raised in Alabama where her family first settled in the 1820s.   She attended the University of Tennessee, as did her parents and grandparents. Then, like everyone else in the south, it seemed, she moved to Atlanta just out of college. Today she lives in Alabama, Atlanta and Montana.

On Writing

For me, writing is memory with hindsight - that is, events, real or imagined, placed in the context of my accumulated experience.

That's why I love writing now that I'm older.   I have a sense of self that has taken years to evolve (read that, "late bloomer").   I hate to think what I might have written in my youth - large amounts of gloom-and-doom drivel, I'm sure. These days I'm not embarrassed to feel a disgusting amount of optimism.

Also, I think I am freer to write now because I am no longer staggered by everything I don't know. I grew up in an age when it was implied that there was a finite amount of Western European knowledge that we were all supposed to somehow wrap our brains around. Then along came the sixties and seventies-and the rest of the world. They never said anything to me about Japanese Haiku in tenth grade, at Coffee High School in Florence, Alabama, in the 1950s. Who knew?

How freeing to know it's a hopeless task and now I can pick and choose only what I like. In this day of technological change at the speed of light, I'm satisfied that the best I can do is be open to learning - and to opening my computer.