The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

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

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.

A lot of my students are Asian-American, and it has been thrilling to watch them break through the stereotypes into something alive and surprising.

One of the most powerful devices is to distort time, to go from human time to atomic time, geologic time. Sometimes you can actually accomplish that, with one unexpected word choice.