Muse: First of all, Whispers of the Muse welcomes you to the site. Tell us a little about yourself. What part of the world do you live in? Tell us about your background?
Ms. Tabor: I live in the Penn Quarter in D.C. I grew up in a Baltimore row house with stairs to the second floor and stairs to the basement and a view from the front door to the back door and the clothes tree outside the door. My childhood house didn’t have hallways or a foyer. There was no place to hide anything or to hide. I could hear the neighbors when they argued and everything that everyone said inside my narrow house was fair game for anyone in the back, the front, up or down the stairs.

Muse: Who are your favorite authors?
Ms. Tabor: Nabokov, Joyce, Auden, Bishop, Kunitz, Dillard. I’ve just read David Shields’ new book Reality Hunger and mention it here because it is a terrific book on the writing process, on the nature of invention, on art and on the torturous permissions process that any writer who quotes in her work must go through.

Muse: Why do you write Literary Memoir? And what other genres do you write?
Ms. Tabor: I began with short elegiac memoir pieces to honor my mother but soon turned to fiction. I now know that all my work is highly autobiographical and, thus, I took the plunge into the literary memoir: tell it all, tell it slant, but pull no punches.

Muse: What is your writing regimen? How often do you work on a novel? Do you set daily time or word goals? What keeps you meeting your deadlines?
Ms. Tabor: I write because it’s the only place I feel totally safe. That means I go there often and regularly. But the biggest surprise with this memoir has been that the promotion of the book, one person at a time, has enormous rewards. Finding you is a prime example. I reply to everyone who reads the book and writes me. These exchanges affirm my belief in the goodness of the world.

Muse: Does the way you personally look at life reflect in your writing style?
Ms. Tabor: How could it not? All the work comes through my consciousness: the good, the bad and the foolish. I do hope that a bit of my father’s wisdom enters my work. I quote him in the memoir, “The circumstances are extenuating.” I believe it does no good to judge. As Milan Kundera says, “Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality.”

Muse: What are the creative jumping off points for you? Are you inspired by dreams? Music? Nature? The occasional black nightmare? What triggers your imagination?
Ms. Tabor: All that but always in non-verbal form: an image: whether it be the whiteness of a leafing tree against night sky or the power of Beethoven or Leonard Cohen or Mark Rothko or what I call the “morning mare,” a nightmare right before I wake.

Muse: Tell us about (Re)Making Love: A Sex After Sixty Story. What was your inspiration?
Ms. Tabor: I think all writing relies on courage: the willingness to say the unsayable, to search for emotional truth. Because this book is a memoir, I needed the courage to write towards that goal without the cover of fiction. My inspiration was my husband’s announcement, oh so Greta Garbo, “I need to live alone.” We had been married 21 years and I had just turned sixty.

Muse: What is your favorite scene from the book and why?
Ms. Tabor: The chapter entitled “Hypersensitive” because I believe I capture here the essence of my father’s fragility and goodness, qualities I have come to understand helped form me as a woman. In the recovery from my husband’s decision, I had to find myself. Understanding my relationship with my father as the love shadow has been part and parcel of that journey.

Muse: Have you written other books?
Ms. Tabor: A collection of connected short stories The Woman Who Never Cooked and an unpublished novel.

Muse: Tell us about your other books?
Ms. Tabor: I was sixty when my first book The Woman Who Never Cooked won Mid-List Press’s First Series award and was published in 2006. The book uses food and adultery as metaphor for the grief I bore through my mother’s, my father’s and my sister’s illnesses and deaths. It’s a zany tour through one woman’s life. I used a series of lenses to get perspective on what had happened, made up stuff that I could make real and surprised myself by discovering stories that revealed. The book is fiction but I am hidden inside the fiction and oddly or maybe not so odd, I included three memoir pieces that I don’t identify as such. But if you write me, I will tell you.

The novel that lies now in a drawer deals with forgiveness: In rereading it, I see that on the unconscious level I knew that my husband was leaving me and I tried to understand what that felt like for him. It is written from his point of view.

Muse: How do you feel about the current publishing marketplace?
Ms. Tabor: The name of the game has always been rejection. No matter how the market changes with bloggers, with the ebook, with Apple’s iPad, that fact must be understood by the artist. I do think that good work “will out.” But the process may or may not be one of fame or even publication in one’s lifetime. I believe that risk is the key: As the philosopher Edmond Jabès says, “If there is no risk, there is no writing.” The risky edgy stuff may be harder for publishers and agents to get, but I believe that regular folk want those stories. My memoir (Re)Making Love: A Sex After Sixty Story will reveal whether I was right about that