Are there books about us or something?” This makes Pressia angry - the idea that this world is a subject of study, a story, instead of filled with real people, trying to survive.

Different genres allow me to not feel so hemmed in by my own voice, tics, style.

No matter what losses happen in a given season, the Red Sox always have next year.

I want to keep looking at ways to stride forward with positivity.

I try not to divide plot and character. I get to know a character by what they want and fear and how those internal forces play out in their lives.

I wrote before I could write. I got my hands on a journal, maybe a hand-me-down; I had three older siblings. My first entries are in the handwriting of the sister closets in age (5 years my senior). She must have gotten tired of my dictations because she gave up and then my blocky scrawl shows up. I wrote plays as a kid mostly.

While I was in college becoming a good Catholic I was also becoming a writer - one haunted by Catholicism.