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

Trying to talk through and figure out new answers really helps me figure out more about what I'm doing - and what we're all doing.

Historical fiction is a collaboration between the time in which it's written and the time that it's writing about and the far future, when we don't know what people are going to think about yet.

A novel is a way to rethink and rewrite and re-envision the past, and also a way to speak to people who haven't been born yet about what we think about right now.

The problems that other writers encounter are so fascinating to me as a writer and as a thinker about writing. I have found that many times, my students are experiencing problems that I myself have experienced in my work, but the solution is different because they're different people.

A lot of people have come up after Brookland and asked, "What happens to her at the end of the novel?" and I will very politely say, well, here are the two possibilities.

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.