I had a dystopian idea in the beginning, and in the end the dystopia caught up with me.

You know what? I’m 45, and I get to write whatever poems I want.

We can quantify human experience but where does individuality fit in? We are predictable creatures, yet there’s a marvelous unknowability about us.

Lan Samantha Chang discusses her fourth novel, an homage to The Brothers Karamazov, as well as balancing writing with teaching and motherhood.

Despite the fact that I’ve spent my entire career saying I would never write a novel, I realized this was the form I needed.

In her forthcoming story collection, Thank You, Mr. Nixon, Jen charts the lives of characters caught between the home they know and the homeland they don’t.

I hope there’s some criticism of the book, even bad reviews of the book. It was written as a way to start a lot of arguments that I think need to be out there. And I’m okay with being criticized.

The state is a writer of bad fiction. They would be shut down in a fiction workshop. My fiction must be more protean, more imaginative, more accurate than what the state produces.

It’s like my mind is a camera, and when I write a scene, I’m visualizing the angle of the shot, and the framing, and the movement.

When asked if stories come more easily now than they used to, Williams explodes with laughter. “No,” she says. “Oh no. No no no no no. They don’t come easily. No.”

We are sustained by certain illusions until the day we die. Those fictions are dearly held and deeply felt, and without them life would not be worth living.

It feels so good emotionally and psychically to get to that state where I am not trapped in my stupid annoying self, but I am in that flow state where my self is blessedly silent and I’m just part of something bigger.