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

There's relief in white space for the reader.

I find myself writing protagonists who do feel pretty cut off from others but who want to make connections and aren't very good at it.

It just fascinates me, those private mechanisms that we use to make sense of the world - whether they have to do with the five senses or not. I think literature is one of the only kinds of art that truly lets us into that.

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.

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

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