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 have a second-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo weapons training.

If you have someone falling out of the boat, you'd have to drag the boat up the river and film the same scene ten times, every time, dragging the boat exactly where it was up the river.

Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.

The truth is I tried to write for years and I wasn't very good.

After a year, it was great to get out of L.A. and return to Hyde Park. Since my grandparents lived in Hyde Park, I had been coming there since I was a tyke.

I loved writing for the school newspaper. I liked to report and interview people, but I really liked to write columns, funny columns.