Writers like Twain, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Russell Banks, Carolyn Chute, Alice Walker, so many others that I read coming up as a writer, that helped form my ideas of what it means to be American - and an American writer. I'm always in conversation with them.

There are so many people who write really interesting work and try super hard and still don't get published.

The "we" voice is rare, and the communal impulse of the "we" is interesting to me.

I love ghost stories, I love to read them, and I love the idea of being haunted.

It's really difficult to know what is the best way forward when you're not getting a lot of support - and probably most writers aren't getting enough support.

I think someone who writes a ghost story probably needs to believe it in some way.

I'm really interested in the United States, what it means to be American - maybe because my father's an immigrant and my grandparents were immigrants, and also because I grew up so isolated from mainstream life, and it was such a total shock to leave the commune and, in a way, enter America for the first time when I was eleven - so I've always felt a little like an anthropologist - like, what is this strange place I find myself in, what are the rules here?