I'm always interested in encountering people who are synesthetic and seeing how they experience things.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.