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.

There is no end to what can be said about the world

For me, the writing life doesn't just happen when I sit at the writing desk. It is a life lived with a centering principle, and mine is this: that I will pay close attention to this world I find myself in. 'My heart keeps open house,' was the way the poet Theodore Roethke put it in a poem. And rendering in language what one sees through the opened windows and doors of that house is a way of bearing witness to the mystery of what it is to be alive in this world.

Schools provide safe spaces to talk about controversial issues, and literature presents characters portraying human experience in all its richness and contradictoriness.

The point is not to pay back kindness but to pass it on.

I think it is important to know how to teach new material to help young people grow and learn.

A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart.