For me, the genders are an essential element of numbers and letters, not something that could be removed from them.

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.

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

I cut hundreds of pages from my book because I felt myself being reiterative or redundant. Sometimes I wanted to leave just hints of things.

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.

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

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.