You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.

I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.

I figure that I'm always going to be fine, one way or another, but I do worry about other people who have difficulty moving from one world to the next. It's the folks who are truly invested in their lives who have the hardest time with change.

I think back when I was kind of a crappy writer, I really did know my time was better spent working and having adventures and seeing the world.

The best and easiest lesson for me was to learn that writing is mostly hard work.

Mostly the natural landscapes work as a sounding board for my characters, so they can understand themselves, and it acts as a mirror in which we readers see ourselves. The natural world is the place into which all my characters have to situate themselves in order to be who they really are, and that makes my rural fiction feel different from a lot of urban fiction.

I always felt a weird obligation to be adventurous.