I was once referred to in a Kirkus review as a "northern Michigan version of Andre Dubus." My editor called me after the review came out and asked if I was okay with that. What part? I wondered. Finding myself in the same sentence with Andre Dubus? What could be better than that? Or perhaps - and more likely, my editor meant being pigeonholed as a writer of this remote region "mostly ignored by the rest of the world," as Jim Harrison says.

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

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."

I was once referred to in a Kirkus review as a "northern Michigan version of Andre Dubus." My editor called me after the review came out and asked if I was okay with that. What part? I wondered. Finding myself in the same sentence with Andre Dubus? What could be better than that? Or perhaps - and more likely, my editor meant being pigeonholed as a writer of this remote region "mostly ignored by the rest of the world," as Jim Harrison says.

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.

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.

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