I think, generally, the flawed anti-hero is much more interesting than the normal hero, and that's really what we're talking about here as it relates to outlaws or renegades.

I'm not Pollyanna - I know that my personality and my opinions and how I approach the teaching of writing maybe isn't exactly how it's done traditionally in the academy...wherever that academy is...but, you know, the academy is broken as it relates to many creative writing programs.

And there are rules for crime fiction. Or if not rules, at least expectations and you have to give the audience what it wants.

You don't see Los Angeles erecting a museum dedicated to the birth place of the Crips and the Bloods and the Mexican Mafia, with a special guided bus tour highlighting the rise of the crack trade, yet you can hop on a bus in Chicago tomorrow to see the famous locales of murders. I have to imagine there's some wonderful academic book on the sociology of this out there.

I do less of that stuff now because I figured out that when I was writing things I didn't care about, it made me angry and depressed, so I turned my focus to what does make me happy, and also I recognized that one of the things that gives me great happiness is teaching creative writing, and so I could write profiles of professional golfers or I could be a professor. Being a professor made me much happier.

I think, generally, the flawed anti-hero is much more interesting than the normal hero, and that's really what we're talking about here as it relates to outlaws or renegades.

I found myself thinking a lot about my own spirituality. What it means to be Jewish, what it means to forgive, what it means to sacrifice, but mostly what it means to be alive, how to be a better person, how not to make the mistakes my parents had made. I guess that's what one might typically call a midlife crisis.