Describe your latest project.
Sight Hound was my attempt to do justice to one of the most important relationships I've ever had in my life... with a dog named Dante, who came along and taught me all of the important lessons I needed to learn about love and about loss, and how the two eventually always go together. Although Sight Hound is a fictional account of that period in my life, the dog's name stays the same in both the real-life and fictionalized versions. When Dante turned four years old he was diagnosed with bone cancer, and that started us off on a three-year journey of experimental treatment where we met so many amazing people: veterinarians, vet students, kids with cancer and the doctor and nurses who care for them. The original desire to write Sight Hound came out of all those hours spent in hospital waiting rooms, seeing everyone around me struggling with the big stuff: hope and love and time and faith. Of course, as the novel started to form, characters emerged and asserted themselves, narrative threads got spun together, as they do. It was only after I turned in the final version that I realized that Sight Hound is actually a book about faith — not in any traditional sense, but the question at its center is, What are we, here at the beginning of a new century, willing to believe in? One character in Sight Hound paints her toenails green in hopes that it will bring rain to her drought starved pasture. Another writes letters to rock stars as an attempt to give meaning to his life. Everyone in Sight Hound is searching for something to believe in, except Dante, the dog with all kinds of sight (insight, second sight, foresight) — he tries to make the humans see that everything they need has been inside of them all along.

What fictional character would you date and why?
Oh, I love these kinds of questions! Awhile back I said I wanted to go to lunch with the narrator of Ray Carver's Cathedral, but dating him would be a much poorer idea. Dating fictional characters seems like a pretty dangerous idea in general, since we love the characters best whose flaws we recognize so immediately. I've always had kind of a thing for the kid in Richard Ford's "Communist," and I might like to date the man he might have grown up to be. I fell instantly in love with the narrator in Ron Carlson's "A Note on the Type," even though he stole cars and did a whole lot of jail time. Updike's narrator in "Gesturing" seems like a pretty good example of a grown-up man, in other words, who I've always thought I should date, and I'm also kind of crazy about Sherman Alexie's narrator in "What You Pawn I Will Redeem," even though I'm pretty sure he is dead when the story ends, and he might even have been dead from the very beginning.

Writers are better liars than other people. True or False. Why or not.
Oh man, what a complicated question. The simple answer is true, and for a very simple reason. We know exactly where and when to insert the telling detail. For instance, if I am running late to some event and have to call and make an excuse, I won't say, "I had a flat tire." I will say, "I had two flat tires, can you believe it?" And they will, every time. That is the best thing that writers know... the particular physical detail that stretches, but does not snap belief. On the other hand, writers are terrible confessors, and once I've gotten them all to believe me, once I have described the clunk-a-clunka noise that they car was making, my confusion because I couldn't tell which side it was coming from, how I took out the spare and stared at it for a while trying to figure out which side was the most important one to put it on, the tall drink of water who eventually pulled his 1964 F100 Ford with the gear shift on the steering column over to the side of the road and offered me a ride to the next town, the way he and his Blue Heeler and I shared a bag of elk jerkey he'd dried himself and listened to Glen Campbell; it is right about at that point that I'll admit I really just overslept.

Offer a favorite sentence or a passage from another writer:
"You behave as if everything I do is part of the story of your life. You are the main character, I am a minor character who doesn't make an appearance until half way through. Well, contrary to what you think, people are not divided into major and minor. I am not minor. I have a life of my own, just as important to me as yours is to you, and in my life I am the one who makes the decisions."
— J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace

(And one more because it was too hard to decide...)

"But I can't say that aloud; I can't tell anyone that I have been waiting for this all my life and that being chosen to wait is the reason I can. If I were able I'd say it. Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now."
— Toni Morrison, Jazz

What section of the newspaper do you read first?
The sports page, always, and the only magazine I read religiously is Sports Illustrated, every week, cover to cover, Steve Rushin to Rick Reilly. Being a sports fan is my number one guilty pleasure. Hockey, Football, Baseball, Basketball, in that order. I am a paint-my-face Colorado Avalanche fan. The only time I have ever in my life gotten in a physical fight with someone was with a St. Louis Blues fan — a frat boy type — who insulted the mother of our goalie, Patrick Roy. Last Sunday night I was at the Broncos-Raiders game in a blizzard, and, I counted, I was wearing fifteen total articles of clothing, and twelve of the fifteen bore a Broncos logo. I take a lot of teasing about the Carmelo Anthony poster I have up on the wall of my office at the university. And Dante, the magnificent wolfhound who is the subject of my novel, was named not for the Italian poet, as most people suspect, but for the Colorado Rockies left fielder, Dante Bichette.

What makes your favorite pair of shoes better than the rest?
So many things. First, the fact that whenever anyone I know sees me in them, they burst out laughing. Not because they are funny, though they are, a little, but because they so much seem like something I would never wear. They are high heels, very high, and they are pumps, with a patent leather toe and a patent leather heel and in between very close cropped Holstein cow fur. Because they say, inside of them, Made by Donald Pliner in the Mountains of Italy, and it is nice to think of Donald himself, fashioning my shoes on a little stool, under a pine tree, overlooking the snow covered Alps. Because for a limited time — six hours, say — I can actually walk in them comfortably, and I am just now working on learning how to stride. Because I love to surprise people, and because I bought them in a the middle of a mini mid-life crisis, and because if I were going to have a pair of stiletto pumps, these are exactly the ones I would have.

What is your astrological sign? And would you change it?
I am a Capricorn. And I am the ultimate Capricorn, so thinking of changing is out of the question. I am a stubborn animal ascending the hill slowly. If a bunch of Scorpios came along in a taxi and said, "Hey, you want a ride?" I would say no thanks; I would rather do it myself. In case there is any doubt about this, in Chinese astrology I am an Ox. There you have it — two slow, stubborn animals, work horses, maybe with blinders on, looking hard at the task at hand.