There's relief in white space for the reader.

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

In general, teaching writing makes me a far better reader because there's so many ways to write a good sentence or a good story, and as a teacher I'm obliged to consider them all, rather than staying in the safety of my own tendencies.

In my short stories there's a lot of focus on people successfully and not successfully responding to some sorts of discomforts or instabilities.

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.

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.

I have what I came to find in my research is a mild form of synesthesia, though I never would have labeled it as such. It's how I think about numbers and letters. They all have inherent genders.