People have less privacy and are crammed together in cities, but in the wide open spaces they secretly keep tabs on each other a lot more

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.

Capo, my first golden retriever, so loved to swim she once jumped off a cliff to get into Lake Superior.

I have one vivid memory of one of the days that the marches were taking place. We were in a Catholic, predominantly Polish and Lithuanian neighborhood. Chicago is a place where people define themselves by their parish and by their ethnicity.

I live and die with the Chicago Cubs

I believe in the dull lie - make your story boring enough and no one will question it.

I believe that to create real-seeming characters, the writer must be willing to go on a voyage of self-exploration. It can be revealing and even painful to explore your own weakness, but it gives you genuine emotion. Characters in fiction come alive because of the believability of their emotional lives and that is what I strive to create.