"Here is another collection of stories. These stories are different from the others. Now and then stories have just presented themselves to me, absolutely whole, no thought or revision required. And it seems to me that in these stories, my voice is a little different: more clearly a child's voice. I think of these stories as gifts from the child who was me: and here they are: Stories from the Child ."-from the author's preface "Marie Sheppard Williams does what Emily Dickinson does: she watches the back yard closely and notices the cosmos circling . By the end of [a] story life has grown larger and more complicated-as it should in good stories."-Bill Holm, Minnesota author and poet