One good thing the teaching has given me is the ability to read and revise my own work.

Susan Rebecca White has a keen sense for how her characters talk and think. An impressive debut.

Of course I'd sometimes have characters from downstate living upstate, but it took a while for me to start writing about where I grew up.

When I teach, I try to assign writers from whom I can learn.

I'll write about California someday, I imagine, but I don't know when.

I think it's probably better to make a region your own, and then maybe you can go somewhere else, but a lot of great writers have stuck to one region.

I believe that we can access stories, and voices from those around us, more easily often than from our own imperfect memories.

I think narrators expect a high level of intimacy with their readers, and vice versa.

I tend to listen to my friends and family empathetically, and I try to help work through their problems from the inside. I try to adopt their thinking.

I think the voice can carry a story.

I'm always relearning things I thought I'd learned for good a while back.

Complexes and negative beliefs remain in our sub consciousness for a life time

It took me twenty years of living with my father to accept the idea that being good could be good enough.

And then everything was in the hands of gravity, which has never had much love for the terminally stupid.

It's very hard to write humor.

The paramedic whispered in my ear 'God will never leave you or forsake you.'

Art is something out of the ordinary commenting on the ordinary.

Weird doors open. People fall into things.

I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.

It was God who created hell as a place to store evil. He didn't do a good job of keeping it there though.

This is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions, what only lunatics could believe on their own.