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

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.

First of all, I don't think of myself as a northern Michigan writer. I think of myself as an American writer who happens - and yes, by choice, and for a long time now - to live in this particular place, and where, as the joke goes, there are only three seasons: July, August, and winter.

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.

As David Roderick says about writing, "It's not the tale that pleases, it's the telling," and I could not agree more.

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

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