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 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'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.

I began as a poet, moved to short fiction, then to novel writing, and, for the past twelve years, back to stories. I sometimes wonder if the pendulum will swing all the way back to where I began. As T.S. Eliot says, "In my end is my beginning," but for now I'm staying put, sitting tight, and loving the short story form way too much to leave it quite yet.

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.

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.