I think what I'm after, a lot of the time, is just honesty. What accounts for the fact that the stories we tell ourselves - the story we carry around and think of most often - are the dark ones? Maybe we have to wander around in the darkness to understand it?

There's a great Anton Chekhov quote. He says, "The Russian loves recalling life, but he does not love living." That scene has always been something that I have held dear. When something happens, the first thing you want to do is tell it. That's almost more exciting. It's almost simultaneous with the experience; you are already telling something incredible while it's happening. The stories that everybody carries around and repeats, I am really interested in that.

I'm pretty tight - I rewrite, in some cases, 70 to 80 times before I show it to people.

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

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 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.

John Colman Wood's The Names of Things is a thoughtful, patient, and ultimately rewarding book. It's about, among many other things, the connections human beings make, that in spite of everything, we will always make. To quote from the book, 'What he saw in the people was what the old anthropologists called communitas. It wasn't that the people sang and moved. It was their singing and moving together' Singing and moving together, Wood has found a way to express this profound and beautiful idea through fiction.