Once a poet always a poet, and even though I haven't written poems for a long time, I can nonetheless say that everything I've ever learned about writing lyrical fiction has been informed by three decades of writing in lines and stanzas. For me the real drama of fiction is almost always the drama of the language.

When Kevin Brockmeier says, "Everything, given the possibility, would choose to be a song," I recognize the implicit truth of such a miracle. What can I say, I'm Irish, and we take naturally to that sort of thing.

Compassion is the belief that things might improve, and even when there's little, if anything, to sustain and engender that belief. It's the place from which I write, and the more troubled the circumstances, the deeper into the hearts and psyches of these characters I'm likely to go, opening every door in that dark hallway, and walking all the way in.

I joke sometimes that I live a protracted adolescence, that a part of me will always be twelve years old.

Jose Ortega y Gasset says, "Tell me the landscape in which you live, and I will tell you who you are." Asserting that character/community is formed, at least in part, by the physical landscape in which he/she resides. And this is underscored by the fact - and not all that long ago - that people and place were, in fact, synonymous: Sapho of Lesbos, for example. Or my middle namesake, Saint Francis of Assisi. Jesus of Nazareth.

When Robert Bly visited Interlochen Center for the Arts so many years ago, he spoke to the creative writing majors and said, "The eye reports to the brain, but the ear reports to the heart." Perhaps this is the thing that musicians can do that writers can't ever, quite, but it is what I aspire to, that sense/power of the auditory, and the belief that to hear more clearly is to see more clearly, and that to see more clearly is to feel more deeply.

I am by nature not a list-keeper, but I do keep lists of names and add at least one or two every single day without exception. First names, last names, middle names, combinations of. I've collected more over the years than I can possibly ever use in a single lifetime, but I keep the list going nonetheless. I tell my students that it's a habit, an act of attention, that will keep them engaged, keep them thinking about characters and stories, and how that match might get made.