Why are you a writer?

It happened by accident. I grew up in an ungrammatical family. There weren’t many books in the house, mostly just the Lansing State Journal.

So what happened?

Well, I was an athlete in high school, an all-state distance runner. I loved running. It made me feel so good and it felt good to be good at something.

I don’t see the connection.

Running was what I was good at, but then I broke my foot and then a car hit me and I broke my arm in two places and then I had a hernia. That didn’t all happen at once. It was a series of events. But when I tried to come back, to be a runner again because that was pretty much my whole identity, I developed tendonitis so bad that my leg wouldn’t bend. So I had a lot of down time. I spent a lot of time in bed trying to heal and I started reading a lot. I discovered that I loved books, but I didn’t try to write anything back then. I was a reader. I still read more than I write.