My god, people are selling their work and people are reading it! The horror! That MFA programs have to advertise that they'll let you write YA or fantasy or what-have-you is just absurd, but we do, because the presumption is that they're closed to that sort of thing. You're offering an MFA in creative writing? Teach people how to write well, worry about that part, let the writers come up with the stories.

My god, people are selling their work and people are reading it! The horror! That MFA programs have to advertise that they'll let you write YA or fantasy or what-have-you is just absurd, but we do, because the presumption is that they're closed to that sort of thing. You're offering an MFA in creative writing? Teach people how to write well, worry about that part, let the writers come up with the stories.

All of which is mostly bullshit. The reality is that it's just like any other Ponzi scheme: the guys at the top are doing pretty well, but the guys on the bottom are doing Amway pitches in trailer parks.

There's an old, private cemetery here in Palm Springs, where I live, just down the street from the airport, that belongs to one of the local Native American tribes, and it occurred to me one day that if you really wanted to get away with murder, you'd kill someone, put them in a coffin and bury them in a private cemetery or, better, an abandoned one. And then suddenly this whole idea of a long con appeared before me and I had this idea of using a Jewish cemetery.

We understand a person with problems, someone who is wrong about a lot of things in his or her life, who makes messes. We don't understand someone who is constantly right, who is only felled by Kryptonite. Chuck Klosterman had a pretty great book about this whole thing - I Wear The Black Hat - that came out last year and which I greatly enjoyed.

I think my philosophy has evolved over the years. I started teaching almost 15 years ago and I've learned that how one student learns is obviously much different than how another student learns and so I've had to figure out how to get through to people honestly without hurting their feelings - which is no easy task just in the scope of being a human being, much less in the classroom, but which is something that is more important to me now than it was when I was 30 - and to show them a path to improving.

We like the idea of a guy who gets away with it ("it" in this case being a variety of things: murder, robbery, general mayhem, adultery, screwing over the government, basic intimidation and thuggery, etc.). It's a very American ideal - the freedom to break the law.