In 'The Third Hotel,' my narrator, Claire, is wrestling with this sense of perpetual unfinishedness. She's trying to make sense of her husband's death, how someone's life can just stop and not continue, and of the lack of resolution in her own inner life.

As a young writer, I was sort of sailing around trying to 'find my voice' - for lack of a better term - and I was really chafing against the very minimal brand of domestic realism that I'd read so much of in college.

The short story has been here and is here and will be here as long as we are.

Paradoxically, the only thing that helps when I'm feeling despairing about writing is to write.

I am temperamentally drawn to work that shoves the strange and normal against one another, it's true, although I don't see the 'strange' and the 'normal' as being two separate categories of experience; for me, they are intertwined, hard to separate.

I really need so much time to really make headway on a novel that requires me to disappear from the world in a way.

I do not work well when I am in living in a cyclone of panic. I reject actively seeking out destabilization and suffering as a creative model.

I am an incorrigible eavesdropper, so I am very much influenced by what I hear.

As a teenager, I struggled a lot, had several major depressive episodes, and ended up dropping out of high school and getting a GED.

I can't write anything if I don't know where it's set, where the events are happening - even if the details of setting are minimal.

'Find Me' I think, is brooding in a very literal sense of the word in that you have all of these sort of interior storm that's growing within Joy over the course of the book and leading her to her moment. And certainly, I think there's an aspect of the supernatural.

I've always been most drawn to fiction that wrestles with that death-fear. Sometimes I joke with my students, 'If no one is in danger of dying, I'm not interested,' but of course I'm not really joking.

Sometimes we talk about memory as though it's firm and fixed, but of course, memory is highly fluid and subjective and thus highly subject to manipulation.

In the novels I most admire, there is this sense that, within the confines of the world, the possibilities are always opening in new and surprising ways - that was a quality I strived to capture, with the hope that the reader would be willing to follow me.

I always tell my students that, in fiction, the opening is a clue to the work's DNA: not only what it is, but what it will become, where it will lead you.

To me, in general, something that's really rich in terms of identity about transit spaces is that they're so intimate. Especially thinking about long international flights when we're trying to sleep on the plane - we're total strangers, but we're sleeping next to each other.

I lived in Florida until I was 22.

Children exist in the worlds that adults create for them, both locally and globally, and their options are, by virtue of age, often painfully limited.

I tend to be drawn to characters who are not rule followers, who behave in unexpected and unusual ways.

I've had a somewhat typical experience in that many of the contemporary writers I was exposed to early on were white and often male.

The kind of dystopian books that I've always loved the most are the ones where you find yourself in a world that's less scorched-earth and instead a world that has just been made different.

As a reader, I appreciate a world that feels unsettled and also visceral, inhabitable, so that's a quality I try and bring to my own work. In this way, dislocation and precision make total sense to me as a unit.

If we can think of a place, the physicality of a place, as a kind of 'material,' I would say the landscape of Florida in particular was especially important while writing 'Isle.'

In August 2008, I moved with the man who would become my husband from Boston to a cabin in rural North Carolina.