You don't have to write like David Foster Wallace or James Baldwin or Maggie Nelson - indeed, you shouldn't. Those writers are doing it better than you ever could.

Maybe feeling of presence in my body is why I've always sought out extreme experiences; it forces me to be in a moment, to face the fact of my existing in that particular moment, in my body.

You don't have to write like David Foster Wallace or James Baldwin or Maggie Nelson - indeed, you shouldn't. Those writers are doing it better than you ever could.

New York at night, from its bridges, is a miracle. When I first came to the city, it took all my fantasies and set them on fire, turned them into flickering constellations of light.

Fiction stymies me with its possibility. I can't see the bottom and I freeze, cling to the side, or just choke. In nonfiction, particularly that which takes personal narrative for its primary topic, I have a finite space and a finite amount of material. I can't fabricate material, I can only shape and burrow into it.

Most of the smart things I've ever thought or written came vis-a-vis my body.

I've always looked very closely at people, and seen a lot; that was true even when I was a kid. That's what made me a good domme, but it's also what makes me well suited to being a writer, and a teacher.