FIVE SUMMER STORIES : HARRIET DOERR

“I wrote ‘Like Heaven’ after ‘Stones for Ibarra,’ toward the end of my stay at the Stanford Writing Program. Then I put it away and didn’t look at it again for years.

“I was suddenly moved--for some reason that was part wanting to invent and part wanting to remember--to write about a small town on the California coast. I have more or less preserved the town as I remember it. People guess where it is, which town; they guess every town along the coast.

“I think everything that anyone writes is a combination of memory and imagination. I don’t sit at the typewriter and analyze how much is fiction and how much is fact. They cannot be separated.”