In fiction you can make up everything to create the feeling. You can manufacture a story with whatever tools you want. With nonfiction you have to rely on what actually happened to describe what you're feeling. That's hard. You have to know what will feed into the emotion you're trying to convey. And that's hard because you don't necessarily know what causes your emotions.

I hide my documents in many different places on my computer, because I often write things that I would never want anybody to read, at least unedited, and I'm paranoid that someone might figure out what the password to my computer is and maliciously read my Word documents. So a lot of the time I lose things I've written and/or completely forget about them.

My artistic process involves pens, gesso, acrylic paint, and markers, all on vellum. I use a window painter's technique and paint on the backside of my image before I mess with the front.

In fiction you can make up everything to create the feeling. You can manufacture a story with whatever tools you want. With nonfiction you have to rely on what actually happened to describe what you're feeling. That's hard. You have to know what will feed into the emotion you're trying to convey. And that's hard because you don't necessarily know what causes your emotions.

The last time I was asked that, I said "A Year Without Spoons." Normally you get asked the same questions over and over, so it feels boring to say the same thing. But then I was like, I don't even know another essay I like. They're all good.

I have hundreds of Word documents filled with pages of one-liners. If I begin to write a story, or if one of my thoughts leads to more than a couple paragraphs of writing, I'll go into these documents and pull out lines that I think would work with it.

I think it's really important to have a sense of humor.