If I don't read, I get lonely. If I don't write, I forget who I am.

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

Nothing is more fatiguing than winter, the extreme and unrelenting snow and below zero temperatures, and the seemingly unbearable sameness of the days without sunshine, and the measures one takes - if they're locals, permanent residents - against an environment such as this. And most vulnerable/susceptible are the kids, who have no options other than to scheme and dream themselves into all kinds of trouble.

As David Roderick says about writing, "It's not the tale that pleases, it's the telling," and I could not agree more.

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.

As a writer, I find it a literal impossibility to disengage from whatever the location might be, given how everything that eventually transpires as part of the ongoing narrative is informed by it. In other words, try relocating the stories elsewhere, and what's the effect? They almost immediately cease to exist.