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

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

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

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.

Even in so-called realist or conventional writing there can be defamiliarization.

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.

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.