No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered.

Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them.

No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered.

A couple of years ago I picked up New Yorker writer Alma Guillermoprieto's "The Heart That Bleeds," which is reportage from Latin America in the 1990s. You can predict that some books will give you a thrill, but you can't predict the books that will hit you hard. It is a little bit like falling in love.

My father who in this case was an obsessive life-long storyteller, and by a very peculiar trick of my father's. My father would tell a very, very long story, and the punch line would be in Yiddish.

I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter.

In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.