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

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

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.

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.

There's relief in white space for the reader.

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."

The act of language or the act of denying language carries its own heaviness.