In some sense that was a blessing, because it forced me to focus on prose. I feel my narrative voice in prose is more authentically me because I developed it without ever soliciting the advice of anyone else.

Engaging with creativity in a serious way is a shamanistic activity, and by extension when you choose to follow a mystical path you cannot have a "normal" life within the community. Your job is to stand outside the community and hold up the mirror.

If you're trying to convey a crucial emotional truth, you have to be in total control of the emotional pacing of the story, and if you can only strike one note in terms of tone then you're going to be quite limited as a writer.

Most writers are lazy intellectuals, and it's a goddamn shame because a writer with an audience has a moral responsibility to make readers think about the world in a different way than what they're used to. Why else would you pick up a book if not to inhabit another realm of existence for a while?

It all depends on what I'm working on and if there is a deadline involved. Anything that's headed toward a magazine or newspaper is hacked out on the computer; that's a matter of efficiency. I write longer pieces of prose on a typewriter because the act of retyping it for the computer is a useful tactic for revision. Poems tend to be written longhand.

As I've picked up more responsibilities in life, I've found nearly every one of those extra burdens drains me in a way that makes writing more difficult. That may not be the case for everyone - I know plenty of writers and artists who seem to have energy in abundance for all the facets of life; but are they producing anything worthwhile?

I view my stories as sexual or personal. Curiously, I don't. When I was writing those stories I thought of them as comedy pieces in the vein of performance monologue, such as you might get with Richard Pryor, or Lenny Bruce, or George Carlin. So I don't feel vulnerable because I know the line of demarcation between "Writer Kevin" and "Narrative Kevin."