In my short stories there's a lot of focus on people successfully and not successfully responding to some sorts of discomforts or instabilities.

When I watch students make particular decisions about language, structure, and form, it sharpens my own thinking and my own development as a writer.

I don't know whose sensibility I'm responding to. Until someone starts pushing against what they've inherited and starts making their own decisions about language, it's difficult.

I started reading contemporary fiction in college or right after college. It wasn't as if I was steeped in experimental minimalism when I was twelve or something. I was reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond.

In my short stories there's a lot of focus on people successfully and not successfully responding to some sorts of discomforts or instabilities.

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.