If one writes the rules then one can contradict oneself. It's all about rhetoric, about official narratives.

I do teach fiction and non-fiction, and usually I'm interested in works that confuse genre, but I'm very new to teaching creative writing, I don't have an MFA, or a PhD, I tend to approach it just through my own practice.

I always remember my childhood as traumatic, for various reasons; I always felt alienated, outside.

People are depressed for many reasons, one of which I think is how we have been taught to react to trauma, to stress.

I think for a woman, getting older can help, through personal experience, although of course older women are then rendered invisible in our society, another existential crisis.

I try to tell student writers to read as much as possible, not only literature but philosophy, theory, and to form obsessions. There's a big taboo in fiction creative writing workshops against using the self at all, and I think I try to encourage students to write the self, but to connect the self to something larger, which is to be this thinking, seeing, searching, eternally curious person, and that writing can come out of investigating and trying to understand confusion, and doubts, and obsessions.

The hope in literature is that we are allowed to be imperfect, to write of our imperfection, without being overly critiqued for being unlikeable.