It's not that I don't enjoy other people, but what I find with writers is this back and forth. And also, there's no need to talk about work.

Do not discount the psychic warmth of the hive.

No place is perfect, but I admire Oahu for its offering of the tropical and the urban, and then its Asian-inflected culture and cuisines.

We can skip through a lot of the stuff people might ask about the writing of the book, and so their comments always start well, well down into the nitty-gritty.

I'm more interested in the psychic intricacies that they build up and try to run away from, and how they self-construct. A lot of my work is about self-construction. Here, it's those folks who are deeply wounded and bewildered. They're not just victims of trauma; they've been shaken so forcefully that they don't quite know how or where to stand.

I really try to forget. I only look at my old works if there's an interview and someone asks me about it. Otherwise, it's not even in the rearview mirror.

Not to any really influential effect, but certainly there have been comments that have surprised me. It's surprising sometimes to get particular perspectives on your work, and it's enlightening sometimes to know that non-writers and readers out there have certain assumptions about everything that I both want to keep in mind and want to forget about why I write, and about the connection between me as a private person and the stuff that I think about on the page.