Havana is a uniquely complicated city and contains a great many histories.

In terms of specific cinematic influences, certainly I'd recommend 'Juan de los Muertos,' and I also really love this French zombie movie - 'Les Revenants' - where the dead reanimate for no apparent reason.

Holy cow - everything about writing a novel is hard for me.

Florida is a very idiosyncratic place in a lot of ways - as are many parts of our fine country, but one could say Florida is particularly idiosyncratic.

There's the public self that we present to the outer world. There's the private self, which maybe takes more time to access. But ultimately, what I'm most interested in as a writer is a few notches below the private self.

In fiction, we are not bound by social convention, so the things that mystify and unsettle are allowed to rise to the surface.

With both novels and short stories, I think a lot in terms of character arcs, when it comes to endings.

It puzzles me when writers say they can't read fiction when they're writing fiction because they don't want to be influenced. I'm totally open to useful influence. I'm praying for it.

If I'm really rolling with a short story, I work on it everywhere and end up with a finished draft in a couple months, but a novel really demands that I step out of my life and vanish into the world of the book.

I think that one thing about teaching is you're trying to communicate your thoughts about a work to a group of people who may or may not share that sentiment. This has forced me to become a lot more articulate about what I respond to and what I don't respond to in fiction.

I know some writers that have a million novel ideas, but I don't.

I'm such a first-person writer.

I have no problem quitting things, because I have a horror of boredom.

Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms.

Whether it's via the monstrous or the paranormal, horror actually can really get at some of the most fundamental human questions.

I think my favorite horror films are really grounded in human psychology, which is to say I think through sort of extreme dislocations of reality.

I love creating mysteries, but I am terrible at solving them.

I think where a writer falls on the realism/non-realism continuum has a lot to do with their sight, as in, 'This is how I see the world.' And it seems my sight is off-kilter and kind of strange, but I come by that naturally; I'm not consciously pushing toward a particular point on the continuum.

I love many realists but very strongly resist the notion that realism presents a less stylized, more authentic version of the world.

When I'm absorbed in a work of fiction, time and place melts away, as though I've drifted away from my usual reality and been absorbed into another.

I lived in Boston for three years, and during that time, I wrote my first collection of stories, 'What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us;' other stories that didn't make it into the collection; and several failed novel openings.

Florida is a most unusual place. It can feel at once stifling and like anything is possible there.

When I first left Florida for Boston, I was so eager to shed my Floridian identity, perhaps some of my earlier surreal gestures felt hollow and unconvincing because they were not rising from the particular brand of the uncanny I knew best.

I love noir, quite obviously.

I think, in a lot of ways, if you really strip down some of the most compelling novels, in a lot of ways, they're detective stories.

I love Javier Marias; I love his novel 'Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me.'

When I was in grad school, my husband and I used to house sit for a couple in Harvard Square, so we have these amazing memories of great Cambridge summers.

In the world of the American creative writing workshop, I've encountered teachers who are tempted to place, or have actually placed, a moratorium on child narrators. Students love to write them, but children come laden with complications.

Children tell themselves stories, engage in self-delusion and fantasy, but those narratives are more evolving than calcified - and with that malleability comes both freedom and danger.

As we know all too well, our early years are formative in ways it can takes us a lifetime to grasp. Those years leave deep marks; in that way, the stakes of childhood are inherently very high.

Not long after watching 'The Passenger,' I wrote the first lines of 'The Isle of Youth,' which concerns twin sisters who swap identities and become ensnared in the Miami underworld.

Since childhood, I've been a fan of mysteries - 'Nancy Drew' lovers unite! - but 'Vertigo' struck me as an entirely new take on the genre.

When I'm working on a short story, I could duck into a bathroom at a crowded party and write a scene, which is to say I can work in a very incremental way.

For three years, I lived in a miniscule apartment on Beacon Street, less than a mile from the Boston Marathon explosions.

The moment when my husband and I clasped hands and turned from our officiant, newly wed, was the most light-filled of my life.

Often, contrasts bring art to life: the bright speck of paint on a dark canvas; the tightrope walk between humor and tragedy.

Normally I'm the type who wouldn't bail on a responsibility unless dead on the side of the road, and I believe deeply in the importance of continuing to follow our own paths.

I'm pretty sure that I've never confessed in an interview my weakness for McDonald's Filet-O-Fish. The cheese is fake. Who knows what that 'fish' really is. It is gross. It is amazing.

It's not easy to craft a novel that gradually erodes the reader's comprehension of the world, of reality and identity and the passage of time.

Like many artists, I have issues with anxiety and depression, so I try to live in a way that supports my mental health.

We write in a culture that favors the heft of the novel. Better still if the novel in question is large enough to be wielded interchangeably as a doorstop and a weapon.

Like many American readers, I was first introduced to Magda Szabo's work when New York Review Books reissued the Hungarian master's profound and haunting novel 'The Door.'

The past is an open wound, a life force busily shaping an increasingly bewildering present.

A collection is, by my lights, a chance to build a universe, an overarching ecosystem. But it's common enough to encounter a hodgepodge instead, where flashes of brilliance are undercut by clunkers.

Being scared by a movie offers a safe catharsis, because the terror is confined to the screen. It's an adrenalin spike, and when I come back down, I feel a bit more leveled.

When I'm between projects, I keep a journal I call a 'thought log,' and it's my practice to write down whatever interests me.

I teach fiction in my workshops, and some of the readings could be classified as horror. For example, 'House Taken Over,' a short story by Julio Cortazar, is a work I regularly teach.

In my own life, I have found grief to be enormously distorting, particularly if it's sudden or extreme in nature.

I take a pretty expansive view of craft, which is to say I don't see craft as just being technique - it's also process; subject; ideas and feelings; visions and dreams; the words that are put down and the words that are avoided.

I am a pretty omnivoracious reader in respect to prose style, but if the prose doesn't have its own music, if the relationship to the sentence seems unconsidered or superficial, I have a really hard time reading the work.