For me, fiction's great gift - to writer and reader, alike - is freedom.

I find it only natural for a storyteller to be interested in storytelling and, for anyone who spends the better part of his or her life writing fiction, it is hardly surprising that the pleasures, worries, and mechanics of fiction-making should enter the work.

When I was awarded a fellowship in poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts (for "Alphabets"), I felt myself suddenly (vaingloriously) equal to my Crow, which would be - I knew at once - Rat.

I'm too ambitious to give another man credit, even if that other man is only myself in disguise.

The critique of social inequality, which is very much a part of my story, came about naturally from my recollection of Huck and Tom and the controversy surrounding [Mark] Twain's use of them and from my own passionate interest in civil rights, animal rights, and the right of Earth to survive humankind's reprehensible neglect of its stewardship.

The persona in my stories may be truer to my "real" self than any alleged objective, factual "I" that I could replicate for the purposes of storytelling.

I very much like the idea of the unreliable narrator. Shaping my fictions as monologues - by introducing the "I" - allows me to be as unreliable as I like.