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

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.

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.

What does it mean to be Catholic and not a Catholic? I feel adrift, homeless. My Catholic imagination allows me to see the soul as a lit breath, seeking the divine. It persists.

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.