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.

It just fascinates me, those private mechanisms that we use to make sense of the world - whether they have to do with the five senses or not. I think literature is one of the only kinds of art that truly lets us into that.

When I watch students make particular decisions about language, structure, and form, it sharpens my own thinking and my own development as a writer.

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.

In my writing classes, I don't outlaw any genre writing.

So often we think of a wound or a loss as making a person feel more deeply, become a better person. But I don't think that always happens. I think it can constrict people's lives, especially if they don't push beyond it.

If a synesthetic person says the letter a is green, it can't ever be anything but green.