[Michael] Chabon, who is himself a brash and playful and ebullient genre-bender, writes about how our idea of what constitutes literary fiction is a very narrow idea that, world-historically, evolved over the last sixty or seventy years or so - that until the rise of that kind of third-person-limited, middle-aged-white-guy-experiencing-enlightenment story as in some way the epitome of literary fiction - before that all kinds of crazy things that we would now define as belonging to genre were part of the literary canon.

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.

I tend to think of writing as a more collaborative project than I think some people do.

It's always the case for writers that when there are limitations, you have the opportunity for your creativity really to blossom and to become deeper and fuller and to move in directions that you wouldn't have discovered on your own.

The development of the plot of the novel leads to a single point, and it's my opinion that the ending that the novel has, which is a somewhat ambiguous ending, is the only logical ending given the structure of the book as a whole.

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.

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