In general, teaching writing makes me a far better reader because there's so many ways to write a good sentence or a good story, and as a teacher I'm obliged to consider them all, rather than staying in the safety of my own tendencies.

I started reading contemporary fiction in college or right after college. It wasn't as if I was steeped in experimental minimalism when I was twelve or something. I was reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond.

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.

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

There's relief in white space for the reader.

Sometimes you just feel like you could work forever on something and never know when it's done.

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