Fading light buttered the ridges until shadows licked them clean and they were lost to nightfall.

I've bumped into at least three people in town who all insist 'Winter's Bone' is about them.

It's not always to the benefit of the story to have it so preordained.

When I left Iowa, I definitely never wanted to stand in front of a group of academics again and see if they approved of me. I made up my mind to take my work to the actual reading public.

Gail had a baby named Ned who was four months old, and a new look of baffled hurt, a left-behind sadness, like she saw that the great world kept spinning onward and away while she'd overnight become glued to her spot.

There's an overlap between social-realist fiction and crime fiction - a sweet spot there.

I have a book in the pipeline of short stories. You want to hear an agent scream, say 'I'm thinking about doing a collection of short stories set in the Ozarks.