Stories begin with microscopic-level detail, in the particularities that make up each individual life.

Years ago, I wrote an article called “Poetry, Pleasure, and the Hedonist Reader” in which I enumerated five or six of the principle pleasures of poetry. One of the final pleasures, for instance, is the pleasure of meaning—the moment when a poem’s emotional effect begins to crystallize into significance you can articulate. But the very final pleasur

The white wall (once of paper, now of pixels) will only open to the right key,

I’ve found that the way to capture the truth of a character—and beyond that, to reflect the truth of how I feel—is to write microscopically. To focus on all the tiny details that, together, make sense of character.

My path as a writer became much more smooth when I learned, when things aren’t going well, to regard my struggles as curious, not tragic. So, How do we get through this puzzle? That’s funny, I thought I could write this book and I can’t, instead of, I have to drink a bottle of gin before eleven to numb myself at how horrifying this is. You could al

For me, almost everything in literature almost always comes down to the question of point of view. Whose story is this, and who’s telling the story of that person?

Once that first line succeeds in selling me on the worthiness of some totality that in no way, at that point, actually exists, I can continue.

And so the “thief” moment is the moment of prose—the moment I go after in my writing. I never achieve the regularity of “Tinker, tailor/ Soldier, sailor.” I’m trying to achieve melodic and rhythmic beauty in prose that is expressed here in this nice little so-called poem.

I think “I’m in the reservation of my mind” has an incredibly destructive connotation for me now. It’s apocalyptic, when I think about it. The human journey has always been about movement. And a century ago, when we moved onto the reservation, my tribe stopped moving. All the innovation we’ve done since then has been just modeling after Europeans.