I'm constantly trying to figure out how to crack that mystery; how to make a novel that has a sense of immediacy of a short story. I try to do that and I'll try it again, but I'll never get it.

A collection, for me, is a book of very diverse stories that somehow speak to each other, across wide geography, across time, years, decades.

As a professor I can't teach writing.

I've spent so many years living in one place and imaging another.

We don't want emotion handed to us - that's not emotion. You have to build and come from the reader's soul.

I write by hand in my notebooks and number the drafts, so I know how crazy I can get with this. Some writers, like my teacher Marilynne Robinson, she only writes one draft. I've thought about this a lot; I think it's because she writes it 80 times in her head before it comes out.

People have to follow their own strangeness. The minute they start making their own vision of the world flattened out so everyone can read it, they lose. I encourage people to be as awkward and odd on the page to capture their own way of seeing the world and not trying to see the world for other people.