Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.

Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It's wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original.

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

Things hardly ever work on the first try. We'll make another, a better one.

It took me about three years to write About Grace. I wasn't teaching two of those years, so I was working eight-hour days, five days a week. And it would include research and reading - it wasn't just a blank page, laying down words.

It wasn't until I was 26 or 25 when I started sending work out to magazines.

My sister-in-law is a painter, and I'll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She'll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get the skills to paint that painting.