It's fiction's job to express how it feels to be living now, and it's a complex feeling, full of contradiction. To me it often feels like a brutal trivialization of reality.

The idea that language can be recombined to create new forms, new things, is of course very old in poetry.

We want to know that we're not alone with our loneliness or loss.

We're getting used to reality and fantasy passing into each other. Much of the border between them has been erased.

Toronto is hard to capture in a few strokes.

There's some evidence that before events of mass trauma, even unpredictable ones, people begin to feel higher anxiety, often expressed in terms specific to the event.

We can't write a serious novel in the 21st century without acknowledging the inescapable self-awareness we're stuck with. The idea we're surrounded by falsehoods and lies. It's hard for the thinking person to believe in narratives. And yet we want some place to invest our belief.