I live in Cullowhee, North Carolina. That's where I teach, at Western Carolina University. That region is where my family has lived for a long time and that region is my landscape.

You got one choice at the beginning but if you didn't choose right, things got narrow real quick.

I think writing a poem is like being a greyhound. Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long row, then down another, and try not to look up too often to see how far you still have to go.

Faulkner came from my region and taught me how you could write about a place.

Furthermore, even if ideas were gettable - say, stacked in a secluded cave like the Dead Sea scrolls - I wouldn't go there. An 'idea,' especially one adhered to from start to finish, can be disastrous for a compelling piece of fiction.

Intensely moving but never sentimental, Academy Street is a profound meditation on what Faulkner called 'the human heart in conflict with itself'. In Tess Lohan, Mary Costello has created one of the most fully realized characters in contemporary fiction. What a marvel of a book.

I learnt how to hunt rattlesnakes with an eagle for Serena.