I love to write when I feel like everybody else is asleep and when I feel like the world is kind of empty in some ways. I find, oddly enough, that I write about loneliness and isolation a lot.

Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future.

In the end, there probably isn't much difference between being in love and acting like you're in love.

I keep a daily journal of whatever weird thought comes into my mind, like when I had a dream I was in North Dakota in the middle of a blizzard and for some reason the Egyptian pyramids were there, too - that I was able to shuffle into the book.

I started out as a poet who primarily wanted to write about image and moment. Over the years I've been trying to teach myself how to do plot and scene. My first story collection had the most issues with the plotlessness, and when I was writing my second collection I was teaching myself how to make things happen.

I'm certainly very influenced by what you would call "contemporary headline horror," stuff that is true crime or for one reason or another catches our attention in the media, those strange cases that we end up obsessing about. I'm always influenced by weird anecdotes and news. And, you know, lastly, probably things that have happened to me in my own life.

Fiction is fun because you get to steal an identity and try to make it authentic.