As a writer, my main objective is to tell the story urgently - as if whispering it into one ear - and to know the characters intimately.

If I'd learned nothing else, it was this: If you want to be a great writer, be a man. If you can't be a man, write like one.

While I was in college becoming a good Catholic I was also becoming a writer - one haunted by Catholicism.

I'm not the kind of writer who's able to block out the world around me. I'm mindful of our own haves and have-nots, how our culture often blames and punishes the have-nots. I worry about our precarious economic and political climate.

It's not that I bounce ideas off of my children as much as it is that having children has had a profound effect on the way I see the world. They have mined my soul. They've made me a better person and therefore a more empathetic writer.

And I know I'm supposed to feel guilty for wanting people to buy my books... and books in general? Novels and poetry, they belong to the realm of art. How dirty of us to try to hawk art! But, after a decade of hand-wringing and apologies, I can't quite muster the guilt anymore.