The Varieties of Religious Experience follows a crow trying to eat some Vienna sausages who gets his head stuck in the can and hits it on the concrete causing him to realize he has lived before. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

As you can imagine, this one pretty much came from real life. I was sitting in traffic, waiting for the bridge to come down, and saw this crow masterfully opening an aluminum can. Seattle is pretty much ground zero for crow behavior research (U of Wa), so there’s a lot of interest in these birds. As always in fiction, you try to take a situation to its extreme. Who would be most shocked at discovering they were reincarnated? A Catholic priest. Couple that with the never-ending sexual abuse scandal and; Voila.

What are some things that you find interesting about the human condition that you think make for great fiction?

No matter which paradigm you use; Old Testament, New Testament, Freud, Jung, and my current jag-Robert Sapolosky, on the neurobiology of behavior; The conflicting pull of our inner emotions (and demons) with our moral compass and our desire to “do the right thing.” The one thing I’ve learned over the years is that it is entirely possible for a human being to believe two entirely opposite things at the same time.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

The persistence of deep inner faith is often coupled with ambivalence.

The irremediable power of shame, as opposed to “guilt.”

Does any notion of our after-death make any consistent sense?

What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?

Satan’s Vermeer. The devil has amassed one of the world’s greatest art collections. All the ‘whereabouts unknown’ are in his private museum. When news of an undiscovered Vermeer looted in WWII reaches him, he sends one of his minions, the reluctant soul of 15th-century artist, Pietro Tocca, to buy it before the Mossad reclaims it for the Jewish family that owned it before the war. Hilarity ensues…

If Varieties generates a fan base I’ll push it though.

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