I've learned so much from my professors and have been fortunate to have had so many good ones, including Frederick and Steven Barthelme, Edward Carey, Jim Magnuson, and Elizabeth McCracken.

I can't remember who said it - I think it was Allan Gurganus when he was visiting the Michener Center - but he told us to "spend [our] gold," meaning, put everything you have into a story. Other "gold" will be waiting for you for your next project.

To be quite honest, along with thinking and such when it comes to writing, I'm not into words like "theory." I'm a PhD dropout. No matter how many twenty-five-page papers I wrote, I never felt like I was saying much. I didn't feel like the writer of the book, whose work I was analyzing, would have been impressed. It didn't matter how much time or effort I put in.

I suppose this is, essentially, my perspective on life. Just because we've made mistakes and learned things from them intellectually doesn't mean we won't continue to make the same mistakes over and over again.

I think there simply comes a point at which you're beating your head against the wall with revision, when you're making something different but not better. For me, revision usually has more to do with making the language prettier, finding clearer images, using more active verbs.

There are many stories I've wanted to write that I'm simply not able to - sometimes I haven't found the way in yet, and it doesn't matter how hard I try.

Making all of those words work together is difficult. It took a lot of cleaning up, a lot of rewriting scenes in order to make them more vivid. I used everything - every oddity I've ever seen on the side of the road, every interesting memory I could make relevant.