There's relief in white space for the reader.

Synesthesia has interested me for a long time, both as a literary device and as a puncturing of the membranes that organize how the world comes into someone's head.

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 cut hundreds of pages from my book because I felt myself being reiterative or redundant. Sometimes I wanted to leave just hints of things.

Even while I was working on the novel I would also write short stories as relief, just to be in a wieldier world that could negotiated more easily and more quickly. In the novel, I even changed the narrator from a man to a woman.

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

Another obligation that I have as a teacher is to make available to students a range of options and devices and approaches, rather than saying "well here's one way to do it and that's the only way that's good."