I'm A Private Person, A

While Writing, Writers Are Living Inside A Character Or Characters, And When The Book Ekes Into The World, Writers Are Living Inside The Reader. That's More Than Connecting.

My Son Is Actually Named After Beck, The Musician. We Heard Beck On The Radio And Thought That Was A Good Nickname For A Child. We Named Our Son Beckett So We Could Call Him Beck - We Reverse Engineered. And Then After He Was Born And I Saw The Name On The Birth Certificate I Realized Beckett Was A Really Pretentious Name, Way Too Literary. Luckily He's Grown Into It. We Nearly Named My Second Son Dashiell. Can You Imagine? Beckett And Dashiell. It Would Have Been A Disaster Of Pretentiousness.

The Trouble Is That America's Become A Utopia Accessible Only To Some People. Others Get Trampled On. Perhaps It's A Problem Of Size. Robin Dunbar, An Anthropologist, Once Gave The Ideal Number Of A Given Community As 148. That Seems About Right To Me. There's Something Idealistic About That - In A Group Of 148 People You Can Get To Know Everybody.

I Think That Writers Have Natural Canvases, And My Canvas, Even In Short Stories, Often Seems To Be The Scope Of A Life.

I Kept A Lot Of My Thoughts Inside Myself. So, Perhaps More Than Is Normal, I'm Always Questioning My Role As A Writer. I'm Always Stopping And Asking Myself: Do I Have The Right To Tell This Story? Is It A Story That Deserves To Be Heard? And As For Whether I Think Of Myself As A Writer With A Capital "w," I Very Much Hope I Never Do.