It's always gratifying to hear from a passionate reader, and as a longtime educator, I'm especially pleased and heartened when that reader is a young student who is inspired to write me and let me know that my book has helped him or her find her way.

Every writer can tell you that a book is only truly alive when it finds passionate readers who bring it alive in their imaginations.

Reading and thoughtfulness and openness are the best way, I should think, to begin to address the richness that is in each of us.

But the sensibility of the writer, whether fiction or poetry, comes from paying attention. I tell my students that writing doesn't begin when you sit down to write. It's a way of being in the world, and the essence of it is paying attention.

Depression is always in the details.

Literature is about being a complex, contradictory human being.

It's like my whole world is coming undone, but when I write, my pencil is a needle and thread, and I'm stitching the scraps back together.