When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.

Love. The black hook. The spear singing through the mind.

To be of mixed blood is a great gift for a writer. I have one foot on tribal lands and one foot in middle-class life.

To think about love and passion and political correctness all together, it doesn't work. Art has to go way past the political to be effective.

Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position.

As soon as there's a crisis, there are people who take charge and want to control others. Climate-change catastrophe and human migration and immigration are great for corporate and governmental control over people, and we have to contend with that. I should say, I see corporate control behind everything that the government is working on right now.

I make very involved drawings, even little structures, and try using design to figure out the rhythm of a plot. If there are several narrators then a clue has to pop up in the first line. There have to be certain grammatical clues, or distinctive names.