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.

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

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.

For me, the genders are an essential element of numbers and letters, not something that could be removed from them.

I find myself writing protagonists who do feel pretty cut off from others but who want to make connections and aren't very good at it.

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."

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.