I'm interested in how the confessional is so abrasively critiqued today. I'm not really comfortable with simply confessing but I do think "confessing" is a major part of reckoning.

I'm accountable - this sounds emo - to black American writing, Southern writing, Southern black American writing, American writing and my people. That's kind of what keeps me accountable.

I'm also, than anything else, a teacher and a student. And without the four hours, I'm pretty monsterish. For real.

I'm an obsessive writer who needs and loves revision. Writing helps me learn and helps me teach.

I allude to Back to the Future in the 1985 story to let folks know it was an inspiration and because it literally was the most time-travelly bit of pop culture we had in the mid 80's. I can talk about their tools for considering change. First, the book is metafictive in a traditional sense where I'm showing and telling the reader that the act of writing and reading is a reflexive way to push boundaries of real and literal time travel. Writers and readers are time travellers. The question is what we do with that time we traveled when we leave a book, leave a page.

The "How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others" essay was so hard to write because of the memories, the sensory stuff, but also because it didn't follow the form of any essay that I've ever read. And the truth that I was exploring necessitated that obliteration of traditional form, I think.

First of all, the novel should be a critique of the novels that have come before it in a language that broadens the audience of American literature. Second, it's really got to be invested in a number of what-if questions.