My mom says I'm destined to be the sort of man who uses big words but pronounces them incorrectly.

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'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.

I would love to travel around the world working for a travel company taking students abroad on cultural immersion trips.

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.

Given the brevity of our time here, it does seem likely that our species, too, must have at best a blinkered understanding of the shape of things, the import of certain events and what distinguishes "good" from "bad" luck.

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