I think that different pleasures work for different readers - a friend of mine won't read anything that's not a cardiovascular sort of page-turner. I tend to care less about plot, but I'm a sucker for humor and strangeness.

I think there's a kind of confidence I often feel when I'm writing that I don't feel when I'm in the world, I guess. I feel a different kind of conviction about my choices. I feel much more insecure and awkward in the world, somehow, than I do when I'm writing.

I took a fiction-writing workshop my sophomore year at Northwestern, and I hadn't yet read Junot Diaz or George Saunders, Flannery O'Connor. There was something so attractive about those voices.

I was sort of growing up at a time of really rapidly expanding ecological consciousness. It was a time of reckoning when people were talking about how the Everglades was on life support. I was always trying to reconcile it as a kid.

I wrote 'Ava Wrestles the Alligator' when I was 22 or 23. These people and that world have been evolving in me for a while. It's such a shift not to be in that world.

I'd love to meet Flannery O'Connor. I think I'd be content to hear her speak on any subject. What forces shaped her. What nebula of books and stories were whirling together inside her at the time of her death.

I'm living two blocks away from this library - and I don't know why I was so elated about this - but I'm in my mesh jogging shorts in the elevator and I saw that my book 'Swamplandia!' was their book club selection. And I was over the moon.

In short stories there's more permission to be elliptical. You can have image-logic, or it's almost like a poem in that you can come to a lot of meanings within a short space.

In workshopping short stories I learned how to get character down, and how to work with ratios of literal to fantastic to make a world that people can believe in even if it's a little wild or out there.

It can be difficult workshopping novels because any questions or qualms you have as the author can be like, 'That's next chapter, don't worry about it!' I don't think the workshop is set up so well to do that for novels.

Now I'll read anytime, anywhere. I love reading in front of the space heater. Isn't that a sad confession? But it's like my substitute for the roaring fireplace of yore.

Sometimes it can feel like the whole globe is spinning with irredeemable losses, capricious natural disasters and crimes so outrageously evil they dismantle any attempt to solve or explain them.

The very best moment of writing 'Swamplandia!' was when I figured out what the ending should be. And even though I changed the prose of it, that realization was an ice cube melting in my chest.

Writers get embarrassed sometimes in talking about how much fun writing can be, but drafting is often really enjoyable. Often, you're tumbling in the dark, and you don't know where the story is going to lead.

It took me the bulk of my twenties to write one book about a family of alligator wrestlers. Whereas somebody like Steve Martin is releasing his latest banjo symphony, having just completed another movie and acclaimed, best-selling novel.

Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive.

For me, writing is a parenthesis where I can make sense of life.

I am extremely close to my brother, Kent, and my sister, Lauren, who have been remarkably understanding about all of my weird sibling tales.

I grew up reading a lot of these super weird, genre-bending Southern gothic writers.

I have a B.A. in Spanish, so briefly I thought that somebody might pay me to speak Spanish badly in another country, like Norway.