I'm about going out in the world and noticing stuff, and going home and writing it down, and putting it next to other stuff I've noticed and seeing what happens.

I've been to a lot of school and read a lot of thick books, but at my very core there's a made-for-TV-movie mentality I don't think i will ever shake.

I always think, when I'm in motion, writing seems like the most natural thing.

Traveling is my priority, because it drives the writing, so I teach around the travel, and sometimes the travel is the teaching.

Every day at about four o'clock, I would go up to a farmhouse - or whatever kind of house was around - and knock on the door and say, "Hi, I'm biking across Canada, and I'm wondering if I could pitch my tent on your land." And sometimes people slammed the door in my face, but the vast majority of the time they said, "Of course," and then they said, "Come for dinner," and then they packed me food the next day and fed me breakfast and sometimes they got out the bottle of wine they'd been saving for a special occasion.

Praise Roxane Gay for her big-hearted self-examining intelligence, for her inclusive and forgiving stance, for her courage and determination . . . for saying out loud the things we were thinking, for guiding us back to ourselves and returning to us what was ours all along.

There's this great Ron Carlson story, "A Note on the Type," and it's about this guy who keeps escaping from prison. He's really good at escaping, but he gets caught all the time, because he can't stop writing his name on underpasses where he's running from the law. And there's this whole beautiful paragraph about how to run is to write. And, you know, it's obviously about the writer's life.