I feel a responsibility, as I get older, to be responsible to what I've experienced, to what I've lived and been in a position to witness. I realize now that as a consequence of having lived the life I have, quite apart from the one, as I understand it, lived by most American writers, maybe I now know some things and have some stories to tell that others don't know about or wouldn't be able to tell. Maybe there's an intrinsic value in that lived experience and knowledge, though of course what you do with it is everything.

I'm specifically referring to this certain feeling of sadness, fear, and helplessness that descended on me at the Mexico City protest a day or two after the Narvarte murders. Many of us have grown familiar with that feeling. Every few weeks or so it seems we're hit with some new crime or some new corruption scandal that isn't quite the same as a massacre, but that spawns a feeling of futility and despair in its own way.

Mexico just needs more journalists, and especially more good places to publish and exhibit. There are all kinds of censorship practiced in Mexico, not just violent repression. Perhaps the biggest threat to good journalism here is the massive power of the country's media monoliths - Televisa and TV Azteca - who have 80% of the market. They endlessly saturate the country with propaganda and inanity.

Donald Trump is an especially depressing phenomena because he is so debased and debasing and millions and millions of people want him to be president. We're seeing how at least whole swathes of white America are becoming your worst nightmare of eternal Zombie High School. Something like a perfect mix of Groundhog Day and The Moronic Inferno. How can it be that a guy who looks like a bloated cadaver pulled from the Gowanus canal, with some rouge on his cheeks and a sticky Something About Mary wig, is actually applauded by his followers for making fun of how other people look?

Someone wrote in the New York Times recently that if Donald Trump was allowed to go through with his plans, he'd become one of history's major human rights violators and ethnic cleansers, just below the Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin league. But people don't care. Trump goes on Jimmy Fallon's show and that spineless puff of a talk show host praises Trump for being such an "off the cuff" talker and providing "fresh air." Fresh air! What's fresh about racism? it comes out of the darkest dankest rottenest human cellar!

I've written one book-length piece of journalism. The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed Bishop Gerardi? That book had an impact. Eight years after it was published it's still having an impact in Guatemala. I remember when I wrote it, a surprising number of people said things to me like, "That is such an amazing story; why didn't you turn it into a novel?"

I think everything you are, everything that engages you, eventually comes to bear on the novel you write. I think the creative energy in novel writing, obviously, comes from tension. From trying to fuse. From trying to make coherent disparate things that might not at all seem to belong together within a narrative.