BOMB Magazine

People in power probably assumed that because I was writing about poor black southerners, no one would want to read about them. It feels good to get this kind of recognition now and to know that many will read about the kind of people I’m talking about and find the stories universal in some way.

I would maintain that an individual body cannot be really understood or described if you treat it as bounded by its skin.

If your character is a macho, then let him be as macho as macho can be. Just recognize that if everything in your book is macho and you don't realize it because that's how you see the world, it's a blindspot.

I felt a great deal of hesitation and fear, and I assumed that I would never publish anything—it doesn't make sense to me now, and, at this point, it's hard to go back into that kind of mental territory. My life was a struggle. I don't want to go into detail about what kind of struggle, but, you know, I struggled, and I was always having these little epiphanies where I would think, Oh my God, I'm thirty-one and I've finally figured it out. Oh, I'm thirty-six, forty-two, or forty-nine. I constantly felt I was always just finally getting life right. I was never out of my mind, or maybe I should say I was out of my mind in a very sane way, where I was just sitting down and thinking hard about everything I could figure out about life and then drawing conclusions.

It’s really important for the art world to bring in more people, and not just this isolated art crowd. That kills art.

What expression isn’t a negotiation of some sort?