Whether consciously or unconsciously, I felt myself drawn to writing a female character who was pretty flawed and not very virtuous or wonderful or attractive in these ways that throughout literary history we've come to expect female characters to be.

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.

I cut hundreds of pages from my book because I felt myself being reiterative or redundant. Sometimes I wanted to leave just hints of things.

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

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