Occupation: Writer Birth: 1968
I've spent so many years living in one place and imaging another..
I think what I'm after, a lot of the time, is just honesty. What accounts for the fact that the stories we tell ourselves - the story we carry around….
I beat a story to within an inch of its life - that's when I know its done. Not before, not after..
To me, and I'm sure for other writers, too, characters come back and they relive again, but what about those characters who only live for a page or t….
Everybody, doesn't matter who you are, escapes time. And for me, nothing is stranger than the thought that kids are just kids. Nobody is just anythin….
We don't want emotion handed to us - that's not emotion. You have to build and come from the reader's soul..
A novel is like a long relationship and a short story is a brief one that lingers - it lingers powerfully and maybe more powerfully. I think that's t….
People have to follow their own strangeness. The minute they start making their own vision of the world flattened out so everyone can read it, they l….
Rarely is the pain of losing someone expressed with such directness, energy, and, yes, humor. The grief in Evan Kuhlman'sWolf Boyis palpable, and so ….
I feel like there are too many words in the world, and I think silence is so much more powerful than the glut of words..
I agonize over things like this - the order of things, section titles, all this architectural sort of stuff. Takes me years to figure out..
Actually, you’re not famous at all. Maybe you’ll get some traction after you’re dead?.
I agree with the Lev Tolstoy quote completely, but I also feel like there's more to it. What is a happy family and an unhappy family? We're probably ….
Like no other writer in contemporary American literature, Brock Clarke has a way of looking at us, I mean looking straight at us--warts, lots of wart….
There's a great Anton Chekhov quote. He says, "The Russian loves recalling life, but he does not love living." That scene has always been something t….
I write by hand in my notebooks and number the drafts, so I know how crazy I can get with this. Some writers, like my teacher Marilynne Robinson, she….
I think some writers should wait for something to say..
I used to be surprised and a little annoyed when characters would reappear in my mind, itching to be in another story. Now I realize it's part of the….
What you can do with a short story that you can't do with a novel is punch someone in the gut, in the best of ways..
I think that maybe happy families don't need stories the way unhappy families need stories. Maybe they're too busy living that they don't actually st….
A stellar, fully-realized collection of stories... grounded, wonderfully, in the river valleys of western Maine. You come away not only understanding….