In the places that call me out, I know I'll recover my wordless childhood trust in the largeness of life and its willingness to take me in.

If it's important, your heart remembers.

I'm widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I'm not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.

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

Every time I step onto an airplane, I turn to the right and take a good, hard stare into the maw of the engine. I don't know what I'm looking for. I just do it.

Let me claim that Africa and I kept company for a while and then parted ways as if we were both party to relations with a failed outcome. Or say I was afflicted with Africa like a bout of a rare disease from which I have not managed a full recovery.

I've never gotten over high school, to the extent that I'm still a little surprised that my friends want to hang out with me.