There's always a part of your nation's history that you haven't been told that... has a powerful impact on how you yourself may behave and may believe.

The moth settled onto the curtain and sat still. It was an astonishing creature, with black and white wings patterned in geometric shapes, scarlet underwings, and a fat white body with black spots running down it like a snowman's coal buttons. No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world.

Oh, that river of wishes, the slippery crocodile dream of it, how it might have carried my body down through all the glittering sand bars to the sea.

School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.

The last generation's worst fears became the next one's B-grade entertainment.

Southern Appalachians have been ridiculed since the country began. In fiction, they're usually depicted in a cartoonish manner. The region is poor, and very suspicious of outsiders, so there's a sort of 'us versus them' situation. They're easy to poke fun at.

I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.