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 short stories there's a lot of focus on people successfully and not successfully responding to some sorts of discomforts or instabilities.

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

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.

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.

Giving the reader the space to move around and be active, and encourage their active response is important to me. That will connect the reader more to the text.

There's relief in white space for the reader.