Around the time I turned 30, I wanted to publish a novel

Nothing kinder than strangers. Nothing stranger than kindness.

I have a friend who lives in the South Side of Chicago. I helped out at a church charity there where they try to give a bit of cohesion to a desperate area. Everyone was very welcoming

I think Peter Dickinson is hands down the best stylist as a writer and the most interesting storyteller in my genre.

Hard to remember who is more dangerous: the people who are attacking our liberties overseas, or those who are suppressing them at home.

The decimation of Lebanon was showing up in Chicago as a series of restaurants and little shops, just as the destruction of Vietnam had been visible here a decade earlier. If you never read the news but ate out a lot you should be able to tell who was getting beaten up around the world.

She knew the intensity of adolescence, and knew no cure for it except growing up. And then one has age and experience, and mourns the loss of intensity. Maybe it's why musicians and mathmaticians are said to peak young-poetry needs the fire of an unbounded universe.