Great literature rattles the mind and makes the body sing. It's an unmistakable, electric feeling, and too rare. That is what I want.

Great literature rattles the mind and makes the body sing. It's an unmistakable, electric feeling, and too rare. That is what I want.

Humans struggle to remain attuned to one another - they want to turn away because of fear, or ambition, or boredom, or some lure of the ego. It's difficult. It requires radical vulnerability, radical risk.

I have both experienced and witnessed a great deal of suffering in my life, and that has informed my art. I'm here today, because I'm a fighter. I didn't survive my life to ask permission to write my books.

Every aspect of the novel is - or should be - an arrow pointed towards its ultimate meaning, or a multiplicity of possible meanings. But I also value the readers' autonomy, their right to both read and misread.

I often think there are three primary responses to suffering - rage, intoxication, or growth. We either want revenge for our pain, or we numb ourselves with the endless array of intoxicants available to us, from drugs to overwork, or we grow in empathy. Emptiness can transform into spaciousness; lack can become an agent of social action. But I think many of us struggle to remain on that third path without backsliding into the other two. I do.

I stared at the Ohio River every day as a child, a thing that for me is almost more symbol than river. The formation of personality is inextricable from place. It strikes me as an interesting example of dependent co-arising; land shapes the organism, which then reshapes - literally and figuratively - the land. This because of this; not that because not that. Nothing is separate, least of all the literary mind.