What I like about organizing things that way is that each story gets nearly full reign over its own space, but all of them are hung on a single strin….

Very often, or perhaps more often, and even in very good collections - even in some of the best collections ever written, I would argue - it's becaus….

Some writers keep a tighter rein on that than others. For short story collections I'm definitely in the loose-rein camp..

For whatever reason, thus far it's been important to me not to write that kind of collection. Which means that I've spent months playing tic-tac-note….

The most basic organizing principle was pretty straightforward, and is frankly pretty common: the shorter of what are by my lights the two most engag….

I didn't intentionally emplace the raw material needed for political/allegorical readings into any of the first drafts, but sooner or later I saw it ….

I start every first draft with voice rather than theme or image or even character as such, so it isn't like I'm ever rubbing my hands, cackling, "The….

You know how some people say that they can only read one story a day from this or that collection? If that's simply the result of the great tension a….

We should absolutely be concerned with ethical questions - to exactly the same degree as everyone else. It's never my intention to sneak any kind of ….

Realism's anxieties are not my anxieties, but I think I've had its tools close at hand all along. It may be that I'm reaching for them more often tha….

If you're paying attention to human interactions - to the gap between who we are and who we think we are, or the gap between what happened and what w….

The biggest experiment there - and I was convinced for a really long time that it was going to fail horribly - had to do with this weird thing I do e….

When you spend so much time trying to father well, and failing, and trying again, and hopefully failing better, it's going to seep into your work. An….