My teaching career started with me teaching comp at a very small school in Buffalo. And I was terrible at that point. They never should have hired me.

The biggest thing was that second person allowed me to trick myself into revealing more about myself. It gave me an authorial distance to get closer to the action and emotions, if that makes sense.

I'd say the music influences the writing - the music and rhythm of the prose - much more than the writing influences the music.

I don't teach narrative theory by itself anymore, but I kind of use it when critiquing student manuscripts. So, it works its way in there, whether I like it or not.

I think every narrator is an unreliable narrator. In its classic definition - an unreliable narrator is one who reveals something they don't know themselves to be revealing. We all do that.

A lot of my students have been quite notable. Notable in both the personal sense - people who have changed my life - and notable in that many have gone on to enormous success in their writing careers. Whether or not I had a lot to do with those success stories, I'm very proud and happy for my former students getting on the map.

It took me seven years of writing before I published my first story. And then, the publications trickled in over the next five years.