When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.

You don't want people to think you're just writing stories for children about a pig in a tutu.

Whenever someone asks me about fantasy versus realism, I'm like, "I don't know, guys. Did we not all just descend into some underworld, watch strangers from our past kaleidoscope through us according to some pattern that is both illogical and has its own strange melting truth, and then wake up and have a Pop-Tart?" Why are we talking about fantasy and reality like they're opposed?

In a way, I think we all want to look to that journalistic voice as a kind of global omniscience, a big eye to correct for our own limited purview: "Here's a realistic accounting of the world in which we live."

In short stories there's more permission to be elliptical. You can have image-logic, or it's almost like a poem in that you can come to a lot of meanings within a short space.

It remains unbelievable to me that I have any readers beyond my own blood relations - it's a crazy, wild gift.

But if you kept thinking about a fight you’d lost, Mom said, you were programming yourself to lose again.