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

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it.

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

In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.

I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see what you can do.

Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.