I'm of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe.

Any of us who listen to the news or listen to stories our neighbors tell are accustomed to violence. We have to decide then to ignore the violence and create a gentler world in our fiction, or to heighten the violence through the use of point-of-view in order to explore it and gain some insight and understanding. Since I'm living with the violence and trouble in my brain, it's kind of a relief to write about it, to get it on paper, to put it in context, to find meaning in it.

I didn't actually figure out how to get guidance, so I just decided to go to school at University of Southern California because they sent me a glossy brochure.

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.

In fact, when I finally realized I was really going to write, when I was about thirty-four, I was working on my Ph.D. in Mathematics. I was just about to earn my Master's along the way, but I knew something was wrong because I found myself crying all the time.

I'm not much interested in my own self when I write. I'm interested in what I observe out there, what's going on around me.

I wasn't writing stories with the intention of creating a particular collection. I simply wrote stories, and then discovered common themes among a good number of them.