Quotes

The people connected with Brokeback Mountain, including me, hoped that, having been nominated for eight Academy Awards, it would get Best Picture as it had at the funny, lively Independent Spirit Awards. We should have known conservative heffalump Academy voters would have rather different ideas of what was stirring contemporary culture. Roughly 6,000 film industry voters, most in the Los Angeles area, many living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest-homes, out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city, decide which films are good. And rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the Academy voters with DVD copies of Trash - excuse me - "Crash" a few weeks before the ballot deadline. Next year we can look to the awards for controversial themes on the punishment of adulterers with a branding iron in the shape of the letter A, runaway slaves, and the debate over free silver.

Full text source: The Guardian newspaper, 11th March 2006

The construction of short stories calls for a markedly different set of mind than work on a novel, and for me short stories are at once more interesting and more difficult to write than longer work.

In every life there are events that reshape one's sense of existence. Afterward, all is different and the past is dimmed.

If the writer is trying to illustrate a particular period or place, a collection of short stories is a good way to take the reader inside a house of windows, each opening onto different but related views-a kind of flip book of place, time and manners.

Where a story begins in the mind I am not sure-a memory of haystacks, maybe, or wheel ruts in the ruined stone, the ironies that fall out of the friction between past and present, some casual phrase overheard. But something kicks in, some powerful juxtaposition, and the whole book shapes itself up in the mind...

Place and history are central to the fiction I write, both in the broad, general sense and in detailed particulars. Rural North America, regional cultures in critical economic flux, the images of an ideal and seemingly attainable world the characters cherish in their long views despite the rigid and difficult circumstances of their place and time. Those things interest me and are what I write about: the historical skew between what people have hoped for and who they thought they were and what befell them.