We came from Bethlehem, Georgia bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle.

The bad thing about small-town life is that everybody knows your business...I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.

...our best task is to move forward without insisting others slide backward.

I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them.

I didn't study writing in school, I studied biology as an undergraduate and graduate student. So I think that I write fiction in the scientific way. I love invention, obviously; I love creation of character. But I do feel very rooted in the real world, even in the way that I create characters.

Come to think of it, just about every tool was shaped like either a weenie or a pistol, depending on your point of view.

... Urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, 'so far from everything?' When I hear this question over the phone, I'm usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.