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"James Baldwin once said that he wasnt able to really write about America until he left America. And I have this feeling that if you’re in a place, sometimes it’s very difficult to write about it honestly because you’re still dealing with your living in that place, and you don’t have as much perspective. Whereas, if you leave a place, then everything that that place means to you comes into sharper relief, compared to where you’re now living…"

"…I’ve lived in so many places, so I almost feel as though I’m not a native of any one place—though, I definitely consider myself a Southerner. I was raised in Louisville, Kentucky and Atlanta, Georgia. But other places in terms of writing: I’ve written about Baltimore quite a bit, even though in terms of the percentage of my life lived in certain places, Baltimore probably occupies a very small percentage. It’s just been a large part of my imagination in terms of where stories are set…"

"Many writers believe that voice, which is character-based, is the same as style, which I believe is more author-based. The writer almost always has her own style, but I believe that in addition to being drawn to a particular author’s style, readers are also drawn to the singularity of the fictive voice, which is somewhat variant from work to work…"

"I think many [newer] writers are told to “write what you know” because doing so inherently puts them in touch with the sort of deep struggles they’ve wrestled with—even though the fledging writer might immediately downgrade the importance of those struggles simply because they went through them, and feel such struggles aren’t “poetic” enough to justify being written about. But much good writing is about self-evaluation, self-observation. We simultaneously see ourselves in the world and see ourselves through the world. One must care deeply about what we write or else we won’t see deeply enough to make others care and see…"