As someone who played music and never got famous, and remembers little fragments of that, I don't remember life as a dramatic flamboyant thing.

Sometimes you just feel like you could work forever on something and never know when it's done.

I don't know whose sensibility I'm responding to. Until someone starts pushing against what they've inherited and starts making their own decisions about language, it's difficult.

I find myself writing protagonists who do feel pretty cut off from others but who want to make connections and aren't very good at it.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, I felt myself drawn to writing a female character who was pretty flawed and not very virtuous or wonderful or attractive in these ways that throughout literary history we've come to expect female characters to be.

In undergraduate classes, I often see writers who are still simply imitating. I mean, we all imitate - that's how we learn to speak or write in the first place - but they're writing a Dean Koontz novel or something.

Portland is a pretty magnificent place to live.