My brother told me I was going to be a poet. I had a good brother. He did a lot of good brotherly work.

Teaching is a distraction and a burden, but it's also an incredible stimulus. And a reprieve, in a way. When you're trying to work on something and it's not going anywhere, you can go to school and there's a two-and-a-half-hour block of time in which you can accomplish something.

The Bible for me is holy writ. It's a very straightforward thing, although I am not a literalist.

Many readers know my work first through 'Housekeeping,' simply because it was my only novel for a pretty long time.

I did go through graduate school and I like to do research, to create something that has a certain objective solidity. The same thing influences my fiction to some degree, because, you know, my fiction is often based on history that I've read.

A lot of Christian extremism has done a great deal to discredit religion; the main religious traditions have abandoned their own intellectual cultures so drastically that no one has any sense of it other than the fringe.