I try not to think too much or be too impatient, and let the back of my brain do its mysterious work.

I see ghosts everywhere, and that is partially a function of my being incredibly near-sighted and reading way too late into the night.

If the literary category of 'mordant fable' exists at all, it may be because Brock Clarke invented it. The Happiest People in the World is everything we fans have come to love from a Clarke novel: playful and deliriously skewed, and somehow balancing between genuinely great-hearted and gloriously weird.

I'm an anxious person in general, but something about being pregnant and awaiting the release of my first book, The Monsters Of Templeton, made me into an insane anxious person. I didn't sleep at night. I ended up sleeping all day. In a strange way I felt like the world was going to end. I found myself so deeply depressed at times that I started to read about happiness, and that took me into books about idealism and utopianism. Reading books about people who tried to build utopian societies of different kinds gave me a kind of lift.

I think that writers have natural canvases, and my canvas, even in short stories, often seems to be the scope of a life.

As a person, I do ascribe to a lot of magical thinking myself.

If you look at communal experiments in general for any amount of time, you'll find a lot of horrors: raped children, sexual slavery, eugenics experiments, on and on.