In a recent interview, you said that you’re someone who likes to make things; whether it’s building, crafting or cooking. Similarly, in the preface to Shades of the Other Shore, you mention that your writing is grounded in physical things rather than the abstract. Can you explain why this tangibility is important, and how it emerges in your writing?

While I don’t think satisfaction is the business of art, I do get much satisfaction from building a room or a bookcase, restoring parts of our old house, or just going to the market and making a good dinner for my friends. These involve physical activity and engage the senses while producing pleasurable results.

In my preface, I start out by referring to the thingy-ness in the language of the old Anglo-Saxon laments and riddles, how a metaphor, the kenning, is made by juxtaposing two things. It creates a sense of the elemental. Our engagement with the world begins in things, through sensation and senses, and not through abstractions. In poetry or extended metaphor in prose, we put together two disparate things that share an ingenious likeness. But it is the unlikeness that creates tension. Where love can be so near but definitively impossible as Dickinson’s poem 640:

In my preface, I am repeating a persistent romantic idea: in the case of my new book, ghosts pierce the silence through the elements, through seasons, hues of light, and the moods of nature.

Are there certain writers, in any genre, who you always come back to throughout your life? What is it about their writing that persistently draws you to them?

When I’m stuck, when I want to reset my mind into the lyrical mode, I find myself picking up Stevens, Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Plath, Berryman, and Lowell. I share nothing with these writers in temperament; it’s the sheer brilliance of their image making and sense of sound that puts me into the lyrical mode. Prose is much different. I don’t pick up Tolstoy or Proust or Márquez and suddenly feel like writing a paragraph. Kundera and Ondaatje do inspire me; they also make me feel like I don’t have a prayer. Influence is tricky business.

Are you sometimes aware of a central or overall truth that you want to express before sitting down to write — something central at stake? Or do certain truths reveal themselves and click into place as the writing takes shape?

The crucial test for all writing is the sense that it has a reason for being. In all three genres of imaginative writing, the raison d’être is revealed through conflict, transformation, and recognition. Perhaps the sonnet form provides a micro-blueprint. There is an initial conflict, problem, or argument presented in the first stanzas, and then we are presented with the volta, a turn in perspective, or the telling crisis. Then comes transformation of the argument or character with a sense of recognition. This is classic narrative structure. The paradox in this is that one often starts a poem or a short story without knowing what the emotional crux of the piece will be. It is an act of faith that some truth will reveal itself by stirring the inner mud of obsessions and memories.