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.

Portland is a pretty magnificent place to live.

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.

Part of being a writer is feeling that constant dissatisfaction, thinking about what else you could do, and also knowing when it's time to leave a project.

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.

There's relief in white space for the reader.

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