Sex makes things strained. There are lovely people in Oneida, but everyone was married to everyone else. And you had fathers and mothers watching their twelve-year-old daughters being inducted into the group marriage by sixty-five-year-old men. There are creepy aspects of a lot of intentional communities when it comes to sex.

I'm always hungry for people.

I think I'm an optimistic person. Ultimately I believe in people. I believe they can be robust. When my collection Delicate Edible Birds came out there were one or two people who read the title as being a commentary on the characters within the pages, the women in the book, meaning that they were these fragile girls meant for male consumption. But I had meant the opposite - these people are tough. Dark things happen to them but they get on with life as best they can.

Even the presence of my kids cannot, during those writing hours, disturb me. Unless there's a bone sticking out of their arm, I'm not interested.

It seems to me that if you were to take almost any half-century in history, you'd find a grand societal tug-of-war between the community and the individual.

I'm a physical learner. I learn from writing drafts, not reading them.

In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.