Gail Godwin is the bestselling author of numerous novels, including Unfinished Desires, Flora, Grief Cottage, and Old Lovegood Girls, and two story collections. A lifelong diarist, she has published the first two volumes of her journals, excerpts from which were published in Narrative. Godwin is also the author of Getting to Know Death: A Meditation (Bloomsbury, 2024) and Heart: A Natural History of the Heart-Filled Life. She lives in Woodstock, New York.

Photograph by Jolanta Drozd Kaminski.

By Hand

Fiction in Manuscript

by Gail Godwin

Envisioning a story sometimes requires more than text. Through a combination of words and sketches, Gail Godwin’s scenes and characters are fostered from concept to final form. Below are examples of Godwin’s early sketches, as well as a pair of early handwritten drafts from her forthcoming novel, Flora.

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