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."

I felt sure about wanting to look at a person's life that had been limited or damaged, but not necessarily ennobled, by loss.

I find myself writing protagonists who do feel pretty cut off from others but who want to make connections and aren't very good at it.

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.

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.

There's relief in white space for the reader.

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