Portland is a pretty magnificent place to live.

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 while I was working on the novel I would also write short stories as relief, just to be in a wieldier world that could negotiated more easily and more quickly. In the novel, I even changed the narrator from a man to a woman.

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

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.

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