Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle.

When you have an idea for a story, you want those characters to reach as many people as you can. I think you normally think of prose as a way of doing that. It fits our time, the culture.

Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.

Young writers only take off when they find their subjects. Since almost everyone has a family and stories about family, that is often a place to start.

We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.