Surfing is a life path. You have to really commit... You have to let go and have faith that it's gonna work out when you take off.
I've always wanted to be a novelist, so I just try to write really great narrative.
I got out of Iowa all set to be a poet and a novelist, but you know what? It's really tough to make a living as a poet.
My dad was a copywriter on Madison Avenue at the same time as the TV show 'Mad Men' is set. My mom raised the kids and was a scholarship coordinator at a school. More importantly, dad was a writer and my mom an artist.
I have two younger sisters, and it was a family full of creativity.
I always wanted to be a writer. I was writing poetry when I was 6.
My dad's wife, my stepmom, is a serious painter. My dad also paints. My mother is a brilliant sculptor, and her husband is a sculptor.
The one thing they didn't tell you at Iowa is how hard it is to make a living writing fiction and poetry.
Writing 'Dog Stars' was coming home. My spirit just sang. It's what I wanted to do my whole life.
I write a lot of environmental stories.
Writing nonfiction, you're responsible to posterity, to history, to other people because the events happened, and you feel responsible to record them as they happened.
I'm fascinated by characters who are faced with big losses and have to put their lives back together again.
The great thing about fiction is that everything you care about ends up going into the book.
I just love when the learning curve is steep. And I love being in nature, in the wild.
New Zealand is weird. I mean, it does not seem of this earth, not to me. It really is like something made up.
