I don't know whose sensibility I'm responding to. Until someone starts pushing against what they've inherited and starts making their own decisions about language, it's difficult.

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 don't know whose sensibility I'm responding to. Until someone starts pushing against what they've inherited and starts making their own decisions about language, it's difficult.

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.

In general, teaching writing makes me a far better reader because there's so many ways to write a good sentence or a good story, and as a teacher I'm obliged to consider them all, rather than staying in the safety of my own tendencies.

In undergraduate classes, I often see writers who are still simply imitating. I mean, we all imitate - that's how we learn to speak or write in the first place - but they're writing a Dean Koontz novel or something.

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