I sometimes wonder if our memories are a myth. We think we remember, but we are remembering the story and not the actual event?

I sometimes wonder if our memories are a myth. We think we remember, but we are remembering the story and not the actual event?

I used to be surprised and a little annoyed when characters would reappear in my mind, itching to be in another story. Now I realize it's part of the deal, that you create these people out of thin air but then, if you do it right, they actually live.

I've spent so many years living in one place and imaging another.

A collection, for me, is a book of very diverse stories that somehow speak to each other, across wide geography, across time, years, decades.

As a professor I can't teach writing.

Like no other writer in contemporary American literature, Brock Clarke has a way of looking at us, I mean looking straight at us--warts, lots of warts, and beauty and hypocrisy and love, too, the gamut. And hes done it again in this brilliant The Happiest People in the World, a novel that is as hilarious and thought-provoking as it is ultimately, deadly, deadly serious. I for one am grateful hes out there--watching our every move.