Portland is a pretty magnificent place to live.

When I watch students make particular decisions about language, structure, and form, it sharpens my own thinking and my own development as a writer.

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

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.

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

There's relief in white space for the reader.

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.