Killing characters on television has become an easy short cut to cathartic emotion.

I was raised by television. It was my first cultural window. It was a constant companion.

For me as a storyteller, I want to follow the characters and the story through what they organically demand.

The Atlantic really gave me my writing career - even just the conviction to be a writer.

My ultimare goal is, without illusion and without sentimentality, merely by telling the truth as I see it, to break your heart. If I can break your heart and cause your awareness to expand to include another person's experience, even a fictional person's experience, and to inhabit for a moment their sorrow and suffering, then I think it expands us as people.

Art was always for me an escape and a way to relate to the world around me.

I was raised in a heavily Catholic family. Early and consistent encounters with mysticism.