What I've become convinced makes a writer are the days you hate it, the days you'd rather stick those pencils in your eyes. Sometimes I almost punish myself - if I'm not going be able to write, I'm not going be able to do anything else. I just sit there and wait.

Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel's length, satisfies the reader.

A place where something so terrible had happened shouldn't continue to exist in the world

One of my goals is to allow readers to see my characters and the world they inhabit as vividly as possible.

I think that's what I love about writing, is the ability to try to, in a sense, take a vacation from yourself and try to enter the sensibility of another time, another character, another place.

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

We had some good times at school. I didn't know how good those times were until I left, but I guess that's the way of it