When I Write New Worlds, I Work

The Trouble Is That America's Become A Utopia Accessible Only To Some People. Others Get Trampled On. Perhaps It's A Problem Of Size. Robin Dunbar, An Anthropologist, Once Gave The Ideal Number Of A Given Community As 148. That Seems About Right To Me. There's Something Idealistic About That - In A Group Of 148 People You Can Get To Know Everybody.

I See Ghosts Everywhere, And That Is Partially A Function Of My Being Incredibly Near-sighted And Reading Way Too Late Into The Night.

I Don't Believe That Fiction Is Dead. I Know There Are Some People Who Believe That It's An Outdated Art Form, And That To Express Truth Today You Need To Work In Different Forms, To Write Books Where It's Perhaps Not Clear What's Fiction And What's Memoir. I Have Nothing Against Those Books And Love Many Of Them Very Much. But We Have Enough Space For Everyone, Traditional Realists And Hybrid Writers, And Experimental Writers All.

The Idea Of Legitimacy Is Something I Suppose I Deal With In My Fiction, And In Part It's Probably A Response To My Upbringing. When I Was Growing Up I Was The Middle Child, Pathologically Shy, In A Family With A Very Loud And Opinionated Older Brother, And I Felt As If I Never Had The Right To Speak. As A Result, I Simply Didn't Speak Very Much.

Research Is About Following The Gleam Into The Dark. It's Also About Being Sensitive Enough To Know Which Fact Is "the Creative Fact; The Fertile Fact; The Fact That Suggests And Engenders," As Opposed To The Fact That Deadens And Kills A Delicate New Project.