I live with deer and coyotes. Lyme ticks are a daily concern and mystery, but, yes, what do they mean? I don't know yet. But I'd rather point out the abundance of mystery than pretend to solve it. As if I could solve it! What does a deer mean? Who knows? Everything!

My father thought a novel was a broken short story. There's something to that. Many of my favorite novels are novellas. The authors of brief things must reckon with the precision of language.

There's a voice when I write. I speak everything aloud. My family is so accustomed to me talking to myself that often times they don't answer me when I am trying to speak to one of them.

I'll just tell you what I remember because memory is as close as I've gotten to building my own time machine.

The first time I took my daughters to the ocean - and I love the ocean but where we swim is very rough, very New England, rip tide, not messing around ocean - and a thought arrived: I was asking my daughters to slowly recognize death, just dip their toes in its fathomless edge, to know it is there, even in the night when we don't see it and that it, in its mystery and largeness, in its terror, is the thing that makes life precious, magnificent and full of never-ending curiosity.

John Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is very important to me as an influence. When I didn't know how to start Mr. Splitfoot, I just wrote the first line of As I Lay Dying instead and then continued on. It's dissolved in the text now, but it helped me start.

I became a writer because I am the youngest of six children. I listen; I observe. I'm camouflaged as a moth. Mothers are unseen. It helps me write.