I've spent a lot of time in prisons, first doing legal work and later, teaching.

A novel is like a long relationship and a short story is a brief one that lingers - it lingers powerfully and maybe more powerfully. I think that's true in a lot of cases, most long-term relationships compared to some of the briefer ones - the intensity of those brief ones that end, I think a short story is kind of like that. There's a certain level of intensity that I think is different.

I think some writers should wait for something to say.

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.

I beat a story to within an inch of its life - that's when I know its done. Not before, not after.

My characters tend to be people who are looking back on a life lived, their joys, their regrets.

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