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.

I felt sure about wanting to look at a person's life that had been limited or damaged, but not necessarily ennobled, by loss.

Portland is a pretty magnificent place to live.

I'm always interested in encountering people who are synesthetic and seeing how they experience things.

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.

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.

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.