It makes sense that we came up with our public school system during the Industrial Revolution because it's like everybody is a factory worker, eating their terrible food and going back to the room where you're silent and listening to an idiot. That's an epitomizing idea, getting called 'Nothing' for your whole high school experience.

The '80s were a really different time for kids. Technology has changed so much of how we stay in touch and keep tabs on people. Back then, as a kid, you could really just do whatever you wanted until your parents got home.

On the last drafts, I focus on the words themselves, including the rub of vowels and consonants, stressed and unstressed syllables. Yet even at this stage I'm often surprised. A different ending or a new character shows up and I'm back to where I began, letting the story happen, just trying to stay out of the way.

And friends of mine that had photography class in high school would develop the film and make prints and I'd take them back to the track and give 'em away or try and sell them. Much to my parents' dismay, I majored in photography in college.

Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was.