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.

Portland is a pretty magnificent place to live.

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

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

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.

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

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