A good book is a good book, and there are a lot of different ways to approach writing or reading one.

I think about the collaboration between writers and readers, but I also think about the collaboration between all the writers in a generation or in a country or across time contributing to this massive project of documenting and reimagining our world.

I think that we're all always just working on finding how that balance functions for us, given today's circumstances.

We [me and husband ] had been learning about the Khazars, and I had read Michael Chabon's novel [Gentlemen of the Road] the year before, so all these things are kind of roiling around in my brain, and then I slipped on the ice and I broke my wrist, and it had to be surgically repaired.

It would have been a hard year if I'd spent it berating myself for not working on the book.

Teaching and writing, really, they support and nourish each other, and they foster good thinking. Because when you show up in the classroom, you may have on the mantle of authority, but in fact, you're just a writer helping other writers think through their problems. Your experience with the problems you've tried to solve comes into play in how you try to teach them to solve their problems.

It's very difficult, I think for most writers, to carve out the time and the kind of imaginative space to do the writing that you really want to do and also to be an active, engaged, compassionate, giving human being in the world, to the people around you and to your broader community.