The style developed over decades, really, but I started out writing pretty traditional stories, then became impatient. It was a writer named Russell Edson who showed me that one could write in any way at all.

Part of my mind is working on how to end the thing while I'm going on. You need at least two brains to write.

I don't pare down much. I write the beginning of a story in a notebook and it comes out very close to what it will be in the end. There is not much deliberateness about it.

I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.

When I'm trying a new form- trying to do something I'm not used to doing, which was true of the novel.

So the question really is, Why doesn't that pain make you say, I won't do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say that, but you don't.

I don't feel I have to struggle against allegory. I let the readers do the interpreting.