You can't hide behind the guise of fiction. No matter how autobiographical a fictional scene is, you can always tell the reader - in protecting yourself - that you made it up.

I have an MFA in writing. It is debatable if they are right for everyone, but I had a mentor who really changed my life, so it worked for me.

The biggest thing was that second person allowed me to trick myself into revealing more about myself. It gave me an authorial distance to get closer to the action and emotions, if that makes sense.

A lot of my students have been quite notable. Notable in both the personal sense - people who have changed my life - and notable in that many have gone on to enormous success in their writing careers. Whether or not I had a lot to do with those success stories, I'm very proud and happy for my former students getting on the map.

The least trusted testimony in a court of law is eyewitness testimony. We are simply not good reporters of facts that happen to us, or in front of us. But that's not the same as knowingly lying.

My teaching career started with me teaching comp at a very small school in Buffalo. And I was terrible at that point. They never should have hired me.

I think every narrator is an unreliable narrator. In its classic definition - an unreliable narrator is one who reveals something they don't know themselves to be revealing. We all do that.