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

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

Sometimes you just feel like you could work forever on something and never know when it's done.

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.

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.

If a synesthetic person says the letter a is green, it can't ever be anything but green.