You often write about very personal things – your wonderful book The Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart has at its core your struggle with your son’s heart surgeries – and muses on both the physical and metaphysical aspects of ‘heart’ in a very personal way.  How do you resolve the tension between protecting your family’s privacy and sharing that which resonates universally?

This is actually a really good question and something nonfiction writers ponder all the time, especially if you are committing personal essays like small venial sins, as I do. I guess I think that the personal essay, like poetry, is a dangerous knife; it can, when used well, be so sharp and piercing and deft and heartshattering; but poems and personal essays are also immensely liable to self-indulgent crap and solipsism and narcissism and otherisms. I try to tell small true stories and not draw conclusions or wax cosmic, just let the reader eat the story and connect where he or she can. This is hard to explain and I worry about it -- I mean, I do write about my kids a lot, because all subjects are inherent in my kids (fear, joy, urination, etc.), and I don't want to use them for my nefarious purposes, you know? But I also don't want to miss a chance to say something true and bony that arises from my own experience, which is the only wood I have to mill, whereas I am an expert in nothing except Springsteen, obscure William Blake later works, Robert Louis Stevenson's essays, and doing the dishes. Also old American basketball Association stories and players, but that was a thousand years ago before you were born. I am almost fifty and my kids think I must have voted for Abe Lincoln.

Can you talk a little about how being an editor enhances your own writing, how being a writer might effect the decisions you make as an editor, and which you enjoy the most.

Well, I count myself lucky because the job for which I get paid almost enough to pay the bills, the work that crams pasta and milk into my kids, is all about stories and ideas and chances for epiphany. I work for a company that makes awakenings of the head and heart and spirit possible for young people, who will end up running the world. I like my work. Magazines are fun and universities are cool villages with fascinating people and a lot of young energy and zest, plus we have the best women's soccer team on the planet. So for me being an editor, which means trafficking in ideas and words and stories and arguments and debates and facts and science and art and plays and entrepreneurial adventures and engineering and nursing and healing and theology and faces and etc., feeds me as a writer because what you want as a writer is to have Possible Stories floating by all day and night so you can reach up and grab one by the tail here and there and do your best to shape it and let it grow.

As an editor I want stories that matter, stories with bones and hearts; I want stories far more than opinions, commentaries, articles, positions, news. Anyone can report the news. Only a good writer can tell you a story. We aim for stories. Stories matter more, are received more naturally, stay longer, live longer, than news. And the same is true as a writer. I want to tell stories that matter. I appear to be telling shorter and shorter stories as I get older so apparently I will eventually be writing poems and then haiku and then words and then letters and then will do nothing but smile and hum.

I’m always interested in what writers read.  Who are your favorite authors or favorite books? And what are you reading right now?

 O lawdy, Twain, Stevenson, Orwell, Annie Dillard's nonfiction, anything by Ian Frazier, Bernard DeVoto, the great Australian writers Tim Winton and David Malouf and Helen Garner, Blake, Frank O'Connor (my favorite Irish writer), Mary Oliver, Jan Morris (a writer I turn to for lucidity and limpidity and clarity when I feel clogged and stupid, as I turn to Cynthia Ozick and Peter Matthiessen) -- lately I have been reading Bob Pyle, Barbara Tuchman, Julian Barnes, Alastair Reid -- I am sort of a wandering reader and have no pattern. A raven, a maven. All in all as re American writers I think there's Twain and there's everyone else; I think Bellow was the great American writer of the last century; I think Barry Lopez and Ken Kesey and Ursula Le Guin and Stewart Holbrook are the greatest Oregon writers so far; the writers who make me laugh out loud are Frazier and George Saunders and David Duncan; and my favorite books are in no order The Horse's Mouth, Angela's Ashes, Lovely Is The Lee, Kidnapped, Winter Count, Twenty Years A'growing, Life On The Mississippi, and Cloudstreet. I can think of ten thousand more but we'd be here for weeks.