Responding to questions from backburner :

Have you ever grown a full beard?

Yes, I had one for about six months during my sophomore year in college. Naturallly my folks hated it but i kinda liked it. How it looked anyway. Hated the scratchiness. Plus I thought it made me look about 10 years older. So off it went.

If your parents lived in the suburbs of Chicago, do you think you’d still live here?

Oh certainly, because as we all know: the burbs might as well be in another country compared with living in the city. Sometimes it feels as if they have nothing in common whatsoever.

My perception is that you prefer writing fiction rather than non-fiction. Is that accurate and, if so, why?

Actually I prefer to write stuff that’s a mixture of the two, call it what you will: imaginery memoirs, exaggerated reality, etc. My view is that the truth doesn’t necessarily end with the facts. Really you can say things that are more “truthful” if they’re disguised as fiction. Readers automatically draw parallels to “reality” without the author having to do much of anything, if he’s a clever writer. Plus I guess that for me it’s more fun to write about things as I remember them, not as they actually happened. Then you can just call it “fiction.”