I long for, not a writer's retreat - I can write in any situation - but a reader's retreat.

I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.

I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.

A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls.

I like to blur the line between fact and fiction, but not to condescend to the reader by enmeshing her/him into some sort of a postmodern coop.

I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.