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.

The rise of the anti-hero can be traced to a litany of social reasons. Post World War I, for instance, saw the blooming of some pretty dark stuff - I'm thinking of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, for instance, when "The Continental Op" shows up in Poisonville to clean up the town...and proceeds to kill something like thirty people.

So for a long time, I did a lot of freelance writing in addition to writing fiction and such - I was a food critic for a magazine for a bit, I did writing for nonprofits and political things, I was the editorial consultant for another magazine for a couple years, all sorts of jobs.

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.

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.

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.

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.