That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads.

If you didn't grow up like I did then you don't know, and if you don't know it's probably better you don't judge.

I think that distance is good for some people for certain projects. I mean this is sort of a dynamic question. Some projects require more distance than others, some don't require it at all. Sometimes you need it and sometimes you don't.

She smelled like herself, like the wind through a tree.

In '94, I started writing a novel about an enormous terrorist act that destroyed the United States. The novel takes place twenty years after this destruction, with all the stuff that we're dealing with now - a dirty war, the disappeared, the concept of terrorism. Anyway, 9/11 happened some years into the process, and I was like, OK, I don't have a novel.

As for my slowness as a writer - that's been a struggle, no question. We live in a culture that values and rewards machine-speed productivity. Even the arts are expected to conform to the Taylor model of productivity.

If we do not begin to practice the muscles of having a possessive investment in each other's oppressions, then we are in some serious trouble.