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.

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.

As someone who played music and never got famous, and remembers little fragments of that, I don't remember life as a dramatic flamboyant thing.

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

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

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 my writing classes, I don't outlaw any genre writing.