There are certain tribes in the middle Sepik that eat raw bat. A certain kind of raw bat is a delicacy.

Ever since high school I've been writing in a spiral notebook, in pencil. Everything looks too polished on a computer when you start writing, and I can't really see it. I feel like the words are much more naked in pencil, on a notebook.

I had lived in France before graduate school, but because of Spain, I had a lot of the characters go and spend a good bit of time in Spain.

I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.

Anthropologists are great at novelistic observations. I would be thrilled if this novel would encourage anthropologists to write what they see in fictional form.

I've always thought of writing as sort of active communication.

I had one family that used a lot of yelling and screaming, and that was very normal. Another side of my family, nobody would raise their voice at all.