People really get myopic as they get older. We're not a culture that encourages dreaming or distraction. We're not ever good at just being. I remember reading some Adrienne Rich quote where she talks about how important it was just to watch bubbles rise in a glass.

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.

My backyard was replete with madness, it just grew indigenously in South Florida.

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.

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

I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.

A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.