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.

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 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.

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 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.

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