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What makes my work my own is where I'm writing from. And I feel like I have a million stories to write about Chicago.

Chicago is many things to many people, and to me, it is a place where you can write.

I think how Chicago plays a role in my life - it had such a role in my youth and the decisions that I made as a kid and formulated who I am as an artist early on.

I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago.

I think the book that really kind of woke me up a little bit when I was starting to write was 'Winesburg, Ohio' by Sherwood Anderson. I was in grad school at Brown, going for an M.A. in creative writing. Those stories seemed to me to be doing away with pretty writing.

I started writing juvenile novels around 1985. I never really thought of it as a career, but more as a way to make a living.

My first serious attempts at writing were made in 1868, and I took up two very different lines of composition; I wrote some short stories of a very flimsy type, and also a work of a much more ambitious character, 'The Lives of the Black Letter Saints.'

I think Chicago people are very special people, and the Midwest's confluence of East Coast-meets-Midwest sensibilities had to, on a formative level, inform me as an artist and an actor. In that sense, it had to have helped me.

I'm from Ohio, and I wasn't one of those kids who grew up making movies or whatever, but I always wanted to write. I was probably in high school when I realized the things I was writing weren't books; they were movies, they were visual.