When you're in a place, the details you focus on are different than details you focus on when you're writing about it.

In the mess of moving from place to place, I skipped two grades in the space of one year.

I've always written about animals. I'm still trying to process why that is.

Being taken seriously, for a young writer, is a wonderful form of encouragement, but at the same time, I don't think one should ever feel like attempting a kind of artistic endeavor is beyond your scope just because of age or inexperience.

In the end, all you want is someone to long for you when it comes time to put you in the ground.

At the end of the day, despite all the other great things that literature does in society and in a person's life, I think that we read to escape. And I think that place, more than anything, provides that escape quickly, if an author is engaged with the place.

A family has its own rituals and its own superstitions.