I swim with all my strength. No superhuman surge, or pony heroics; it's just me at my most desperate.

A single note, held in an amber suspension of time, like a charcoal drawing of Icarus falling. It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity. It went on and on, until my own lungs were burning. “What bird are you calling?” I asked finally, when I couldn’t stand it any longer. The Bird Man stopped whistling. He grinned, so that I could see all his pebbly teeth. “You.

The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.

It's funny, for a long time I would go watermelon-red and deny that I was a magical realist. It felt imprecise to me, a misrepresentation.

I do think that I have a more flexible view of the interactions between people, and between human and non-human protagonists, humans and their landscapes.

And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.

I often felt myself to be an outsider, which is great training for all writers.