A lot of times, real life is more surreal than writing.

It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghetto-ized as 'other.'

I could stifle my voice, or strip it. I know that I could, because we can do anything we put our minds to. I know that I could, but it feels very unnatural for me to strip my prose like that, in part because place is so important to me.

I always think about Faulkner, and I would argue that there can be a difference between the way that characters express themselves internally and externally.

Young people have a right to optimism, and rightly so; human beings have grown and developed and accomplished wonderful feats in the world. But what mires me in pessimism is the fact that so much of life is pain and sorrow and willful ignorance and violence, and pushing back against that tide takes so much effort, so much steady fight. It's tiring.

I worked with several writers at the University of Michigan: Nicholas Delbanco, Peter Ho Davies, Eileen Pollack, Laura Kasischke, and Thomas Lynch, who told me the same thing over and over again: Persist. Read, write, and improve: tell your stories.

Writing 'Men We Reaped' broke me in different ways at different spots in the drafting process. The first draft was hard because I was just getting it out. In some ways, that draft failed. I was really just telling the story, not making assessments - this happened, then this. Just putting those facts down on paper was really painful.

Faulkner is a really important figure in southern literature. I wrestle with him and his legacy every time I sit down and write a piece of fiction.

In the past, I travelled with 'The Hero and the Crown' by Robin McKinley: I suffer from a fear of flying, and I felt a bit safer knowing I carried the book and characters with me.

As an artist, I feel a certain responsibility to write about difficult subject matter.

There are moments from childhood that attract heat in our memories, some for their sublime brilliance, some for their malignancy. The first time that I was treated differently because of my race is one such memory.

Without the library, I would have been lost.

When I was writing my first novel, 'Where the Line Bleeds,' which had young black men as its main characters, I was very invested in telling the story and also very worried about the effects the story would have.

On one hand, I can say, you know, I had many family members - I had many people in my extended family who left right after Katrina, who relocated to different cities, right? Houston, Atlanta. Right? Most of them have come back.

It's impossible for most black Americans to construct full family trees. Official census records, used by so many genealogy enthusiasts to piece together their families' pasts, don't include our non-European ancestors.

One of the ways my first novel failed was that I was too in love with my characters.

By the time I wrote my memoir, 'Men We Reaped,' I had been running from writing it for a long time. When the events in the book were happening, I knew I'd probably write about them one day. I didn't want to. I'd studied fiction, and I was committed to establishing myself as a fiction writer first.

People ask me all the time, 'Why did I move home?' As well as I can articulate it, that's why. I moved home because I love the community that I come from.

I think, when I write, one of the things that I'm really attempting to do is I'm attempting to humanize my characters.

I couldn't run from that desire to tell stories, that desire to tell stories about us, and about the people I loved.

Biblical myth is as integral to the spirit of the South as the heat and humidity.

I didn't start really focusing on writing until I was 24.

The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.

I feel like in the reading I did when I was growing up, and also in the way that people talk and tell stories here in the South, they use a lot of figurative language. The stories that I heard when I was growing up, and the stories that I read, taught me to use the kind of language that I do. It's hard for me to work against that when I am writing.

I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South.

In American culture at large, but especially in African American culture, it's a sign of weakness to ask for help.

The first writer that I think of immediately that I studied with at Michigan is Peter Ho Davies. He was really important to me, tackling that first novel. Just writing it.

My time in New York really clarified things for me. I thought, 'What could I do with my life that would give it meaning?' And writing was that for me.

It really bothers me when people say we live in a postracial America.

It's very hard to deal with true subject matter, especially when you're writing about such weighty issues.

I'm always curious about other writers' routines.

It's always hard for a writer to make herself into a character; I had to figure out what my defining characteristics were, and that's something I had to work through multiple drafts to figure out.

I love creating that community and writing about that place, because I think, in some ways, Bois Sauvage is like the DeLisle of my past; it's like the DeLisle of the '80s that I can never return to. So in some ways, when I write about Bois Sauvage, I'm writing about a home that I've lost.

It took me a long time to write again because Katrina destroyed the home I loved, and that robbed me of hope.

I think people make certain assumptions about what they're interested in reading or what others would be interested in reading, and when they think of poor black people in the South, they don't think people are interested in reading about those people.

I've found that in fiction - and this is just the kind of writer I am - I can't really work from an outline. I have a vague idea of the characters at the beginning of the book, and then I have a vague idea of whatever the end of the book will be, but I can't approach creative nonfiction like that.

One of the things that is so striking to me about the South, especially living here now as an adult, is that I see a lot more mixed-race couples than I saw when I was growing up in the 1980s and the 1990s. I feel like living across the color lines has become something that's more expected.

History and socio-economic inequality and all those things had, like, borne down upon my family and my community and really sort of narrowed our choices.

Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.

The reason that I like to use classical myths as models is because African American writers and African American stories are usually understood as occurring in some kind of vacuum - because of slavery.

I think that the first book that made me think that I could try to be a writer - or that made me aware that a young black woman from the South could write about the South - was Alice Walker's 'The Color Purple,' which I read for the first time when I was in junior high.

I thought about all those people whose suffering had been erased, and I thought, 'Why can't they speak? Why can't I undo some of that erasure?'

I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?

My mom is the kind of mom, when we would go to a friend of the family's house, and they would offer us something to drink or offer us something to eat, my mother would always say, 'Tell them no.' You could be starving - you could be dehydrated - but as kids, we were supposed to tell the host, 'No.'

I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of 'Salvage the Bones' at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing.

I knew it would be painful to write a memoir.

I think art, especially literature, has the particular power to immerse the viewer or reader into another world. This is especially powerful in literature, when a reader lives the experience of the characters. So if the characters are human and real enough, then readers will feel empathy for them.

Great trouble breeds great art, I think.

That's why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.

Part of me is stuck in my childhood in the Eighties. I actually watch 'The Neverending Story,' 'Labyrinth,' and 'Legend' over and over again. Also, 'Willow' and 'The Goonies.'