Housing Works

"A well-groomed beard is paramount, believes Gregory who when he meets new people says “Please, call me Greg” but doesn’t mean it. The full name is what he likes, its fine whiff of archaism, bouquet of saints and England, popes and Greece; the two “g” sounds granting clangorous passage toward the open and humming “ory” with its quick high finish like young wine or the inflatable slide you ride to escape from the burning plane. But nobody calls him Gregory except his mother, and he rarely calls her at all."

"At the same time, it would be a hopeless world if nobody was able to learn from their mistakes. I have to believe that everyone is capable of changing, but I don’t necessarily think it follows that all change is the result of self-awareness or direct engagement with one’s past. Sometimes the world conspires to offer you opportunities you don’t necessarily deserve, or to make you better than you’d planned to become."

"She’s the “Girls Gone Wild Girl”—a caricature, a type of girl everybody knew in college, and dismissed, most likely as being nothing more than a character, if you will. No one cares what a girl like Bender has to say—in fact when I heard her voice in my head, I wrote her off as a joke. Until I realized what a hypocrite I was being. […] I chose not to tell the end of the Bender’s story. I wanted her to disappear. Because that is what happens in the lives of girls like Belinda, they exist for us in a time and place in our past. Perhaps the vanishing is of their own making, they want to distance themselves from the person they once were, and that time in their life. Perhaps they simply moved on. I know what happened to her, but the reader doesn’t."

"What they [the three novels] share is a group of crucial tropes: communities—civic, familial, professional—on the verge of collapse; masculinity in crisis, or rather, as crisis; the violence inherent in the everyday; a profound fear of having children (because in a world where all of the above is a given, any prospective act of creation can only appear terrifying and obscene); and, last but not least, a wild, pervasive black comedy that allows you to believe—for a while—that you’re reading absurdist farces rather than existential tragedies."

"Writing a place I know—the neighborhood where I grew up, for example—allows me to save my writerly energy for other things. The confidence that comes from authenticity doesn’t hurt either. But with a story like “Flings” (or, from my first book, “Tennessee”) the place is almost another character. It creates a unique set of circumstances that shapes how the characters act and therefore how the story develops."

"My poetry novel and then my sci-fi apocalypse trilogy—or should I switch the order? It’d be nice if they could somehow be the same project: a future-primitive world where poets are the only ones who can fight off the nuclear werewolves that plague our mud hut villages—or where the nuclear werewolves are all poets, and civilization’s last hope is to rediscover the printing press and placate the werewolf-poets by publishing their chapbooks."