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

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.

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.

For me, the genders are an essential element of numbers and letters, not something that could be removed from them.

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

In undergraduate classes, I often see writers who are still simply imitating. I mean, we all imitate - that's how we learn to speak or write in the first place - but they're writing a Dean Koontz novel or something.

Giving the reader the space to move around and be active, and encourage their active response is important to me. That will connect the reader more to the text.