Portland is a pretty magnificent place to live.

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.

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

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

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

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.

There's relief in white space for the reader.