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.

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.

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'm always looking for poetry's place in the prose. For that moment, let's say, that arrests time, or that sentence in which the musical matrix or trope, the sounds of the words arranged in a way that heightens perception, a tunefulness that more clearly defines and transfers the feeling I'm after to the reader.

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.

I can't really recreate or reconstruct exactly how or from where any of my characters originate, young or old, though chances are at least decent that once I name and begin to know them, young or old, I can then attempt to reveal each as psychologically complex and nuanced, and to speak through them, as William Matthews says, "What it feels like to be human."