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.

As a professor I can't teach writing.

We don't want emotion handed to us - that's not emotion. You have to build and come from the reader's soul.

I usually have a location and then I put the character there. I love place names. I think I'm tricking myself by being so specific - it suddenly becomes real to me. Just because I say it's Chicago, Illinois doesn't mean it's true, but place names sort of make me grounded and then I can put some people there.

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

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.

Maybe my work is somewhat divided into family stories, things I know intimately, and then everybody else in the world - the strangers who I am totally fascinated with.