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

In my writing classes, I don't outlaw any genre writing.

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

The act of language or the act of denying language carries its own heaviness.

So often we think of a wound or a loss as making a person feel more deeply, become a better person. But I don't think that always happens. I think it can constrict people's lives, especially if they don't push beyond it.

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.