Maybe that's the foundation of my book: how do we come to terms with the death of someone we love when it is impossible to come to terms with such a …

- Leslie Pietrzyk

I dislike that premise implies that a fiction writer is incapable of dreaming up stories that can bring readers to tears, that if you are lucky enoug…

- Leslie Pietrzyk

In my case, I made the decision early on that I was going to be very open about the book and claim upfront that each of the stories was based on my l…

- Leslie Pietrzyk

My only obligation as a fiction writer is to the story, to make it good, so good the busy reader doesn't feel that flipping those pages was a waste o…

- Leslie Pietrzyk

Writing is my way of trying to understand vast things that probably I'll never truly understand, a way of exploring a Big Question, of wrestling mean…

- Leslie Pietrzyk

Think about the stories you have inside that scare you. That's what you should be writing. I and others call that writing from the dark place. Our hu…

- Leslie Pietrzyk

As writers and readers, we're drawn to conflict. It's that ancient theory of plot that's written on the whiteboard during every fiction workshop, cha…

- Leslie Pietrzyk