To know that the people who are singing along at your show actually have something in common with you and can identify with what you've gone through, makes the songs that much more meaningful to sing.

My whole identity is not gender. My whole identity is not talking about gender. There are so many other things in my life that are fulfilling that I like to think about too.

Trans people should be able to fall in love and sing love songs too, and have that be just as valid. You turn on the radio and every other song is some guy singing about some girl who broke his heart, or vice versa. And there's not a lot of trans representation with that.

I was married for like seven, eight years. And then coming out of that I was like, 'Okay, now what? I guess I would like to date? That's a reasonable thing. I'm allowed to have that!'

If you look at the difference between the first Clash record and 'Combat Rock,' what an evolution.

It's not like I came out in 'Rolling Stone' and all of a sudden I had a closet full of all the clothes I want.

Two Coffins' is a song I wrote for my daughter.

What people don't realize when they talk about our lineup changes is that the original Against Me! broke up in 2001. It never recorded a full-length record.

Living in Italy meant growing up without MTV.

I just always knew that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a musician. I never had any doubts.

At 20, I was married, working as an auto mechanic, and living in Gainesville. I was doing Against Me!, but it wasn't by any means a full-time gig.

My father was stationed in Italy in the military. I had no one to feed me what was cool, so I was into Guns N' Roses and New Kids on the Block and MC Hammer and a lot of '80s hair bands. But I was never into Motley Crue, they never stuck with me.

At 8, I got my first cassette, which was Def Leppard's 'Hysteria.'

I moved to Naples, Florida, and by 15 I was into punk: Green Day, Rancid, NOFX, Operation Ivy. Along with the classic punk bands, like the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Misfits, Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat - all those bands that you get into when you're first getting into punk.

America loves a good comeback story!

I once took a workshop with Jim Shepard, and he has this term, 'rate-of-revelation,' that has come to mean a lot to me: 'the pace at which we're learning crucial emotional information about the stories' central figures.' An ever-increasing rate-of-revelation is good; a stagnant r-of-r is not.

Publishing at a young age is not really an indicator of talent.

Here's something a little more personal: In my teens, I was having a hard time and ended up in a therapy group of young women, some of whom had endured terrible childhood traumas.

Unlike a novel, where you expect a different kind of arc that leaves us with a somber sense of resolution, I think a story in some ways as like a train window: being able to watch the landscape pass for a certain amount of time. And then your stop arrives, and you have to leave.

My students are often asking me, 'What do you think are the most important qualities for a writer?' And one thing I always tells them is that it's helpful to be willing to sit in a space of uncertainty. There are entire years, especially with novels, where you really don't know where the project is going.

I realized that, for me, travel for work - I'm not speaking so much about travel for pleasure - had actually become a way of avoiding life.

I think my concern is I know my voice, and I know the kinds of landscapes that interest me, so my primary concern is doing the most I can with those voices and those landscapes.

I've always found the Write-What-You-Know axiom small and stifling.

I wager we have a vast amount of literature out there that tends to the stories of men, so I've never really worried too much about attending to stories of women.

In August 2008, I moved with the man who would become my husband from Boston to a cabin in rural North Carolina.

If we can think of a place, the physicality of a place, as a kind of 'material,' I would say the landscape of Florida in particular was especially important while writing 'Isle.'

As a reader, I appreciate a world that feels unsettled and also visceral, inhabitable, so that's a quality I try and bring to my own work. In this way, dislocation and precision make total sense to me as a unit.

The kind of dystopian books that I've always loved the most are the ones where you find yourself in a world that's less scorched-earth and instead a world that has just been made different.

I've had a somewhat typical experience in that many of the contemporary writers I was exposed to early on were white and often male.

I tend to be drawn to characters who are not rule followers, who behave in unexpected and unusual ways.

Children exist in the worlds that adults create for them, both locally and globally, and their options are, by virtue of age, often painfully limited.

I lived in Florida until I was 22.

To me, in general, something that's really rich in terms of identity about transit spaces is that they're so intimate. Especially thinking about long international flights when we're trying to sleep on the plane - we're total strangers, but we're sleeping next to each other.

I always tell my students that, in fiction, the opening is a clue to the work's DNA: not only what it is, but what it will become, where it will lead you.

In the novels I most admire, there is this sense that, within the confines of the world, the possibilities are always opening in new and surprising ways - that was a quality I strived to capture, with the hope that the reader would be willing to follow me.

Sometimes we talk about memory as though it's firm and fixed, but of course, memory is highly fluid and subjective and thus highly subject to manipulation.

I've always been most drawn to fiction that wrestles with that death-fear. Sometimes I joke with my students, 'If no one is in danger of dying, I'm not interested,' but of course I'm not really joking.

'Find Me' I think, is brooding in a very literal sense of the word in that you have all of these sort of interior storm that's growing within Joy over the course of the book and leading her to her moment. And certainly, I think there's an aspect of the supernatural.

I can't write anything if I don't know where it's set, where the events are happening - even if the details of setting are minimal.

As a teenager, I struggled a lot, had several major depressive episodes, and ended up dropping out of high school and getting a GED.

I am an incorrigible eavesdropper, so I am very much influenced by what I hear.

I do not work well when I am in living in a cyclone of panic. I reject actively seeking out destabilization and suffering as a creative model.

I really need so much time to really make headway on a novel that requires me to disappear from the world in a way.

I am temperamentally drawn to work that shoves the strange and normal against one another, it's true, although I don't see the 'strange' and the 'normal' as being two separate categories of experience; for me, they are intertwined, hard to separate.

Paradoxically, the only thing that helps when I'm feeling despairing about writing is to write.

The short story has been here and is here and will be here as long as we are.

As a young writer, I was sort of sailing around trying to 'find my voice' - for lack of a better term - and I was really chafing against the very minimal brand of domestic realism that I'd read so much of in college.

In 'The Third Hotel,' my narrator, Claire, is wrestling with this sense of perpetual unfinishedness. She's trying to make sense of her husband's death, how someone's life can just stop and not continue, and of the lack of resolution in her own inner life.

I think writing, or any form of art-making, is a way to prepare for not being here. Not that we can. No amount of preparing can really ready us, in a meaningful way, for the great void that awaits us all.

I was born and raised in Orlando, where the economy and culture has been powerfully shaped by tourism, and so I've long been interested in how we narrate the places we visit, how the gap between what we see and what we know manifests when we're traveling.