I suppose I'm interested in sorrow, which is very different from depression or despair. Sorrow is continuous with the world; it allows for creativity.

You can see the diversity that pieces in the anthology represent, and then the interconnections-obvious and less obvious-between various stories or between various modes of storytelling. Diversity generates need for conversation, conversation generates common interests, as well as differences. Literature, as a human project, is all about that.

We, as writers, have to figure out a way to create a consciousness in language. It's crazy even to attempt to do that.

Cliché activates the comfortable mental laziness, we sort of revert to the domain of the already-familiar, what we have already imagined so that it doesn't seem that bad.

I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.

It was always clear to me that I would have to earn my readers, some I would have to find, some to create.

There is a point in fighting. There is a point in struggle. Not wholesale revolution, maybe, that might not be possible, an absolutely just society, but there are plenty of spaces and places where it's worth putting up a fight.