I am very interested in place, and the influences of place on characters.
My family lived in Egypt from 1993 to 1996.
When you're in a place, the details you focus on are different than details you focus on when you're writing about it.
death should be celebrated...when you put something in the ground you always know where it is
When I was eight years old, I wrote a paragraph-long short story about a goat on my mother's hundred-pound, black-and-white-screen laptop. The story came about largely because I liked the way the word 'goat' looked on the page, but I decided then and there that I wanted to be a writer. That desire never changed.
When I hit a block, regardless of what I am writing, what the subject matter is, or what's going on in the plot, I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish, so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don't know why, but it calms me, calms my brain.
In terms of people that I know, my grandmother and my mother are huge influences on my writing life because they are both massively supportive and always have been of my career.
For me it was a lot harder to come to terms with the death of my grandfather than it was to come to terms with what's happened to the former Yugoslavia.
Being taken seriously, for a young writer, is a wonderful form of encouragement, but at the same time, I don't think one should ever feel like attempting a kind of artistic endeavor is beyond your scope just because of age or inexperience.
In the mess of moving from place to place, I skipped two grades in the space of one year.
What inspires me most to write is the act of traveling.
My road to publishing actually came through a colleague who connected me to my agent, and the faculty at Cornell was very supportive.
