As a reader I gravitate toward work that rests in the gray area, that doesn't come with easy answers.

I don't see the direct correlation between my personal life and the novel I'm writing until I'm at the end of the novel or very close to it.

I tend to start with a fantastical premise, and then I place it in the world we know. Or, really, it places itself. Honestly, I feel that I have very little control of the magical aspect, as that's just what comes out for me.

Usually at the core of fiction that has some element of the absurd there tends to be an examination of some societal ills that we should talk about more than we do. And it's funny, of course, so we have that release valve with absurdism. It offers us a safe way to explore difficult subject matter.

I'd say that most of life seems to me to be that way, a mixture of the mundane and the mythic, when you're living the life of the mind.

Fundamentally I think we all write the kinds of work we'd most like to read. Or we try to.

I'm not conscious of my own themes as I write first drafts, no, and in fact, I work hard to stay in that unconscious space and not ask myself what the novel is about or what my metaphors might mean because then, I think, you're just dead in the water.