I'll take a [Pavel] Chekhov comparison any day! He's of course one of the great masters at the short story form, and has helped define traditional conflict as we understand it.

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 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.

Wit and humor seem to always factor into this - there's a tongue-in-cheek tone you get when you take on a formalist story - because there's an inherent voice you're trying to copy (and often to satirize).

Presently we're seeing these kinds of battles for our most vulnerable students - such as Trans and LGBTQ students. You have a lot of conservative parents/school boards making life much harder for these children by trying to ensure bullying remains in place.

When I wrote the story ["The Cartographers"], I'd just gone through a breakup with a woman I'd loved dearly. Without this other person in my life, the memories we'd shared often felt like phantoms. Who was this person I once loved? Did she still really exist? The answer, on a metaphysical level, was that this person didn't still exist. She'd gone on to become a different person, an individual with new hopes and dreams which no longer involved me.

In Nepal, I realized a certain part of my spiritual search had come to an end. I wasn't ever going to live in a Himalayan cave (I like electricity and a soft bed way too much), and I sure wasn't going to find enlightenment so easily.