I am a toggler. I always have three or four projects going, short stories alongside novels and essays. When one project is terrible, there's somewhere else hopeful to look.

John Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is very important to me as an influence. When I didn't know how to start Mr. Splitfoot, I just wrote the first line of As I Lay Dying instead and then continued on. It's dissolved in the text now, but it helped me start.

I'll just tell you what I remember because memory is as close as I've gotten to building my own time machine.

I think I write mostly about death and so it is interesting to hear how often people think I'm writing about pregnancy and birth. Though of course they are two sides of the same coin. Both when I was pregnant and now as a mother, I am consumed with thoughts of death. This is a strange role in parenting. The death guardian.

In writing I found a way to make silence and to be silent. The short story has a lot more silence than the novel and that is its success.

I am a toggler. I always have three or four projects going, short stories alongside novels and essays. When one project is terrible, there's somewhere else hopeful to look.

As a writer I feel more like a filter than a performer. I absorb and observe and then I name scatterings of stars into constellations. I don't usually spend time asking whether the stars are random or planned. I make a narrative in the darkness, the area subscribed by an outline of bright points. Sometimes they look like Ursa Minor, and sometimes they just looks like one day the world exploded.