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

Pain collected into deep pockets and I was aware of this painbut somehow I could not seem to feel it. It was like a body-deafness.

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

I have a B.A. in Spanish, so briefly I thought that somebody might pay me to speak Spanish badly in another country, like Norway.

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.

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

Somehow I wasn't adding up right anymore. My parts weren't summing into myself.