How did you get started traveling?
The summer after I turned ten, my parents moved my family from New Hampshire to Arizona. We spent three weeks driving cross-country in a yellow 1965 school bus converted into a camper named "Gillie Rom," or "Song of the Road" in Romany, the Gypsy language. We stayed at KOAs, crashed at friends' homes, and got ourselves into all manner of family shenanigans. One night my father jimmied the lock on a rental paddleboat at a KOA, and we all floated along on a moonlit lake while he serenaded us with his classical guitar. That trip awakened in me a pivotal realization that the road was a mysterious place where anything could happen.
How did you get started writing?
From the time I was five, it was clear I'd either be a guitarist or a writer. I wrote in my journal constantly, and my idol was Harriet the Spy because she too scribbled in her diary nonstop. At the age of ten I started writing a novel called Lenny, Jenny, and Me, a tragicomedy about three siblings (Lenny, Jenny, and Penny), whose names rhymed because their parents—unlike my own—were not very bright. It was really terrible, but I wrote hundreds of pages. When I quit playing guitar at the age of thirteen, I knew from that point on that I'd be a writer; I never even considered another path.
Read the rest of the interview here.
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