That larger story in 'Salvage the Bones' is just about survival, and I think that, in the end, there are things about this novel and about these characters' experiences that make their stories universal stories.

I think the novel, the story and the characters are quite universal.

We're all about pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, et cetera - I think that's a harmful mythology, that the choices that we make and the things that we do in our lives are not connected to anything else. So I'd like to help to debunk that.

People ask me about staying here. I think they assume that I wouldn't want to come back to a place like Mississippi, which is so backward and which frustrates me a lot. The responsibility that I feel to tell these stories about the people and the place that I'm from is what pulls me back.

I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of 'Salvage the Bones' at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing.

I've found that in fiction - and this is just the kind of writer I am - I can't really work from an outline. I have a vague idea of the characters at the beginning of the book, and then I have a vague idea of whatever the end of the book will be, but I can't approach creative nonfiction like that.