You couldn't pretend you had lost nothing... you had to begin there, not let your blood freeze over. If your heart turned away at this, it would turn away at something greater, then more and more until your heart stayed averted, immobile, your imagination redistributed away from the world and back only toward the bad maps of yourself, the sour pools of your own pulse, your own tiny, mean, and pointless wants.

Editing is just ongoing. I don't count drafts, or know what would fully constitute a draft. But I try to fix as I go. And there's always more to fix.

To write a short story, you have to be able to stay up all night.

I did think reviewers were supposed to be polite about story collections - collections are rather delicate creatures in the literary environment - but not everybody got this memo, I guess.

If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.