I'm not a very savvy operator - it's not who I am, it's not what I do - and so I have to go at things in ways that suit me. I just write what I write and the stuff finds its vagrant way in the world, somehow. The venues appear; the work always finds a home, eventually.

I have lots of fiction in the drawer, but the essays I mostly kick out into the world, ready or not. Fiction incubates differently, I suppose.

Where exactly do you put your hands on somebody who hurts everywhere?

Behind each piece, animating every attempt, is the echo of a precarious faith, that we are more intimately bound to one another by our kindred doubts than our brave conclusions.

Really, I think among the many mistakes I've made over my life, one of them was caring so much about the short story.

Too much me is annoying under any circumstance, but too much me in an essay, however personal, would mar the art. My "character" in the essay is more like a perspective, an angle of vision, a complicating factor, a questioning presence. I don't sit on the sidelines or pretend to objectivity; and I'm not afraid to stick my neck out or to be revealing and vulnerable.

Our nostalgic dreams of perfection thrive just as dangerously in the other direction too, in the imaginary future, that bold and tantalizing future where the troubles of today will be cured by a tomorrow, and all our losses will be recouped, our problems solved, our lives restored, our people made whole again, etc.