Giving the reader the space to move around and be active, and encourage their active response is important to me. That will connect the reader more to the text.

In undergraduate classes, I often see writers who are still simply imitating. I mean, we all imitate - that's how we learn to speak or write in the first place - but they're writing a Dean Koontz novel or something.

Another obligation that I have as a teacher is to make available to students a range of options and devices and approaches, rather than saying "well here's one way to do it and that's the only way that's good."

I find myself writing protagonists who do feel pretty cut off from others but who want to make connections and aren't very good at it.

In my writing classes, I don't outlaw any genre writing.

Even while I was working on the novel I would also write short stories as relief, just to be in a wieldier world that could negotiated more easily and more quickly. In the novel, I even changed the narrator from a man to a woman.

I felt sure about wanting to look at a person's life that had been limited or damaged, but not necessarily ennobled, by loss.