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Americans are pragmatic; we want quick, clean, simple solutions to vast problems. The paradox is that we're a deeply confessional culture, but we're not often contemplative.

Wars never simply end, not for those in combat and not for the culture, and one way or another, they shape-shift from generation to generation.

Vietnam and Iraq are part of the same national trauma and delusion; we folded the war up when Reagan became president and unpacked it with Bush.

I knew for years I wanted to write a novel that addressed the personal trauma of my older sister, who suffered - and still suffers - from mental illness. For a long time I imagined - and I know it's absurd - that she was an indirect casualty of the Vietnam War.

I don't want to be a commentator of my own work. If you've written the story, you've said what you want to say.

There's a huge distance between who I am as a regular person and what takes place in my fiction.

It's better to know your story than not to know.

I love novels, and I read them more than anything, but stories cut in sharp and hard and are able to reveal things in a different way: they're highly charged, a slightly newer form, and inherently more contemporary.

Novels often thin themselves out to a watery hue - some even start that way - and at times seem to only ride along the surface of things, giving us what we already know, reporting the news that is just news.

I'm not at all interested in simply reporting what's here right now, or cranking out an entertainment device that's going to touch the widest number of people. I'm interested in digging and excavating as deep as I can go into those small eternal moments and how they expand out, or close in, on the lives of my characters.

As a story writer, you have work with sharp but relatively small tools, the picks of metaphor, the shovel blade of images, the trowel of point of view, and then you delicately lift and brush in the revision with love and care knowing that one slip, and you might damage an extremely delicate thing.

I'm a relatively optimistic kind of guy.

I've got deep roots in Kalamazoo, with a grandfather, Harold Allen, who was a big part of Upjohn Co. for many years as the corporate secretary and friends with W. E. Upjohn.

Everyone in my family still lives in Kalamazoo.

We're all building our narratives in our heads.

I studied English at the College of Wooster in Ohio, and I did an M.F.A. in Poetry at Columbia.

I like landscape, I guess. It's kind of a game to see how you can describe it.

I was an at-home father, taking care of them for seven years when they were babies. I was one of those new-age, at-home dads.

Undergraduate writers seem to be, in a way, more open to letting themselves just write.

We believe in cures; we're a quick-fix country, and we drive forward, and we eat up what we have extremely fast in terms of natural resources and also ideas and intellectual property. We're kind of wilfully stupid a lot of the time, anti-intellectual.

You can't take a story and just stretch it out - that does not a novel make.

It's really hard to be a story writer - no matter how much acclaim you get - and not write a novel.

History is delusional. Not just an illusion, it's a delusion. America is this giant country, so it has these big delusions, and history is where delusions play out.

The short story is kind of a precision tool. It allows me a certain type of freedom to go in and out of the American landscape, without having to commit myself to a full-length novel. I find a lot of novels out there very boring.

I find the middle classes kind of boring. The middle class has kind of been beaten like a dead horse by fictional writers. It's old news, and literature is supposed to bring new news, and for me, I feel I have to go as far out as I can to try and tell the kind of stories I want to tell.

I think all good short stories are about what it means to tell a good story.

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