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I have a theory of the first novel now, that it is something that makes the writer, even as the writer makes the novel. That it must be something you care about enough to see through to the end. I tell my students all the time: writing fiction is an exercise in giving a shit - an excuse in finding …

I think writers are often terrifying to normal people - that is, to nonwriters in a capitalist system - for this reason: there is almost nothing they will not sell in order to have the time to write. Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds, time is proba…

When I return from Maine, home again, I open the door to my apartment, afraid my roses will be withered, fainting dead. No rain for four days. I rush to the back, where I find them giddy, hurling color up from the ground like children with streamers at a parade.

I will never forget the classmate who said to me in workshop, about one of my stories, "Why should I care about the lives of these bitchy queens?" It angered me, but I asked myself whether or not I had failed my characters if my story hadn't made them matter to someone disinclined to like or listen…

When an artist dies young there is always talk of the paintings unpainted, the books unwritten, which points to some imaginary storehouse of undone things and not to the imagination itself, the far richer treasure, lost. All of those works are the trail left behind, a path across time, left like th…