Portland is a pretty magnificent place to live.

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

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.

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.

Portland is a pretty magnificent place to live.

Part of being a writer is feeling that constant dissatisfaction, thinking about what else you could do, and also knowing when it's time to leave a project.