Some people tell me they would be afraid of my characters, but I tell those people [that] they meet these characters all the time. They just don't care about them when they meet them, at the gas station, the car wash, the post office even.

Cocoa-buttered girls were stretched out on the public beach in apparently random alignments, but maybe if a weather satellite zoomed in on one of those bodies and then zoomed back out, the photos would show the curving beach itself was another woman, a fractal image made up of the particulate sunbathers. All the beaches pressed together might form female landmasses, female continents, female planets and galaxies. No wonder men felt tense.

I grew up with donkeys, as well as horses, but I'm more interested in donkeys.

We know that we need to explore desire in fiction - many say that the only way a story exists is that a character feels a strong desire - and nature is the place where creatures act on their desires in the most pure way imaginable, so maybe nature also works as a metaphor for whatever emotional troubles my characters have to negotiate. I'm interested in my characters as survivors, and maybe that works best when the old-fashioned notion of humans surviving in wilderness is not too far away.

I love investigating the natural world, and I find a lot of truths there, truths about survival and beauty - nature continually surprises me (amazing how clever a woodchuck is, amazing how plants roots can break up concrete, amazing how delicious the thimbleberry is!).

Drugs and drinking affect every family I know, country and city, middle-class and poor.

Men didn't understand that you couldn't let yourself be consumed with passion when there were so many people needing your attention, when there was so much work to do. Men didn't understand that there was nothing big enough to exempt you from your obligations, which began as soon as the sun rose over the paper company and ended only after you'd finished the day's chores and fell exhausted into sleep against the background noise of I-94.