I kept shooting but started making drafts of the work, essentially spending a few days a month sequencing and editing, hanging things up on the board, showing them to trusted confidantes from in and outside the photo world. It started to take its shape naturally over time until I kind of ran out of ideas.

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.

[Buzzing at the Sill] deals with the margins of America, a lot of parts unseen. Well, parts that are seen and familiar to a lot of the populace, but unseen when it comes to the parameters of what mainstream news and popular culture and Hollywood reflects.

I was taking all prints and I brought them to the Magnum meetings, trying the old Josef Koudelka trick: Give them to photographers, who are getting bored during the talks about the economics of the agency, to look through with a pen. They'll separate them in two piles. I started to find the core pictures that people seem to relate to.

I am still covering conflict to some degree. I was back in Iraq. I've covered quite a bit of the Israel and Palestine. But I'm not doing it with the kind of intensity I was before and I'm not seeking out the front line and the kind danger that comes with being at the edge of the war the way I used to.

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.

I'm a constant editor. Every few months or so I make a ton of 4x6 prints. I put them on a magnetic board and I live with them for a while to see what bubbles to the surface. A lot of this was part of Disco Night originally, and I suddenly started realizing, "If I keep working on this because I'm not done and I put all that in Disco Night, how can this be one book? Is it going to be too long and bloated and crazy?".