I read the poem [In a Dark Time by Theodore Roethke] because I was intrigued and had one of those strange senses: "This poem is kind of important to me. I don't know why, but I'm going to just keep it in the back of my mind." I just kept coming back to it. As I started putting the book together and writing the stories for it, this idea of buzzing as a word kept popping up in my brain.

The travel ban that was imposed by the [Donald Trump] administration is a very direct reverberation of 9/11.

The big question that everyone is asking themselves, or what they should be asking themselves right now, is what role has the media played in not just missing a certain part of American society that wanted to vote for, say, Donald Trump, but what role has the media played in dehumanizing other people and helping create these conditions that people are so afraid of, say, Muslims and extremism?

I realized how little I knew about my own country. I had grown up in the suburbs and, after college, I moved out of the country, so I didn't really know the place well. When I started following soldiers and their families back home, it provoked a lot of the questions about who we are as a nation, questions I realized couldn't be explored through the more limited framework of looking at the military at war and at home.

Nothing is over until there's something more decisive than your own thoughts.

I think a lot of the work I've done and a lot of the work I'm going to do in the future still ties to 9/11 and the fallout from it.

I began to explore America in more general terms. I really started this work in 2009. I got the bulk of it done as I was easing out of Disco Night.