I'm a big fan of Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco's book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, where they visit what they call The Sacrifice Zones of America and report on the current state of our environmental calamity.

I realize that I've had a very idyllic vision of what spirituality looks like. Honestly, most of Western culture has an idyllic and simplified idea of what enlightenment entails.

The problems we have with our current technology often reveal our own human foibles, and it's these new emotions of cyberspace which reveal our struggles.

I love the Russian absurdists - [Nikolai] Gogol,[Daniil] Kharms, and [Vladimir] Bulgakov. Even within the Russian experimentalists, there's a lineage of traditional narrative, conflict, and character development, which I find vital to my storytelling.

That particular story ["The Pyramid and the Ass"] was written during the dark days of the Bush years. George W. Bush had just been "re-elected" (or elected for the first time, depending on how you count the stolen election) and it seemed like the horror of his presidency would last forever.

I set many of my stories in a gritty "realist" world, but one that is plagued by an overuse of technology, which is akin to the world we find ourselves living in now.

However, in my fiction, I want to give an even further warning of where we're heading. And so, in "Heartland," you have people selling off their topsoil, and an underwater oil spill that has lasted over three-hundred days.