I write when I have something to say and not when I don't. My time is better spent if I know I have nothing to say. I don't consider it writer's block; I just don't have anything to say.

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

I agonize over things like this - the order of things, section titles, all this architectural sort of stuff. Takes me years to figure out.

Everybody, doesn't matter who you are, escapes time. And for me, nothing is stranger than the thought that kids are just kids. Nobody is just anything. Whether you are eight or eighty, you've got your own unique take on how weird this world is.

People have to follow their own strangeness. The minute they start making their own vision of the world flattened out so everyone can read it, they lose. I encourage people to be as awkward and odd on the page to capture their own way of seeing the world and not trying to see the world for other people.

To me, and I'm sure for other writers, too, characters come back and they relive again, but what about those characters who only live for a page or two? Or for five pages or 10 pages. I like to think they're still out there - still living - but for me they kind of die, too. It's kind of sad. I don't think about them anymore unless I give them life again.

A stellar, fully-realized collection of stories... grounded, wonderfully, in the river valleys of western Maine. You come away not only understanding a place but the soul of its people.