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

There's always something else to work on and different solutions to these problems in the next thing. We each have a certain set of obsessions which we each cycle through.

Another obligation that I have as a teacher is to make available to students a range of options and devices and approaches, rather than saying "well here's one way to do it and that's the only way that's good."

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

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

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.