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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.