The folks I read as a kid really set me up. I owe a huge debt to Ray Bradbury and Madeleine L'Engle.

I'm probably a lot closer than perhaps the contents of my early fiction suggest to a jaded Denny's waitress with smoker's-lung-black humor than a ghost hunter.

What passes for news is just morbid speculation or cartoonish screaming, followed by diaper commercials.

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

For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.

When I'm drafting, I suppose it's an intuitive process - figuring out when something just has a surreal glaze on it and when it grapples with something that could threaten a character's day-to-day reality.

I didn’t realize that one tragedy can beget another, and another — bright-eyed disasters flooding out of a death hole like bats out of a cave.