I love writing from enclosed spaces: you really learn about your characters when they have tight walls to push against.

We need the skeletons of other stories to understand our own, sometimes.

Fiction is always a utopian task, in that there's an ideal you hold in your head as you write which inevitably fails in the moment of creation, in the insufficiency of words to convey meaning, or in the way the work is completed in the reader's head.

Even the presence of my kids cannot, during those writing hours, disturb me. Unless there's a bone sticking out of their arm, I'm not interested.

I see history as really cyclical in terms of the intense idealism, and the desire to create a better life outside of societal norms.

I'm always hungry for people.

Reading about utopianism, and eventually creating characters with their own utopian ambitions, was the way I learned to live with being a pregnant person, to stave off the sense of incipient disaster. You're bringing a person into this overcrowded world, knowing they're one day going to die and there's nothing you can do about it.