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

I am fascinated by tiny, incremental changes, almost imperceptible shifts in how people orient themselves in the world, because those are in some ways the most hopeful.

I'm always interested in encountering people who are synesthetic and seeing how they experience things.

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.

Synesthesia has interested me for a long time, both as a literary device and as a puncturing of the membranes that organize how the world comes into someone's head.

Portland is a pretty magnificent place to live.

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.