I was interested in writing a child's understanding of a cataclysmic event - something experienced in fragments, whispers, viewed from around corners - and it seemed to me a child would try to understand it through stories and games, which distort and change the experience, then become the experience.

One of the things I prize most about being a writer is its license - you could even say injunction - to be curious, to follow anything anywhere and see where it might take you, how it can transform you, whether in content or form.

Home is a complex and resonant idea.

I love the idea of literature as a room or series of rooms that allow you to be present as it slowly unfolds itself in all its capacities.

Sometimes I think of writing as becoming this antenna that picks up the vibrations all around me in order to find out how and where next I'll be steered.

I was interested in writing a child's understanding of a cataclysmic event - something experienced in fragments, whispers, viewed from around corners - and it seemed to me a child would try to understand it through stories and games, which distort and change the experience, then become the experience.

I know that as a writer I'm trying to, in some small way, return the gift that I got, and maybe provide a reader the kind of experience that has changed my life.