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.

I would like to give you more of my heart,but there is nothing more I can give you. I gave you everything and you crushed it into bits.

I am surprisingly optimistic, though lately that's been hard to maintain. Art and slow, small, close gestures help remind me of my optimism.

Discourse about motherhood is chillingly narrow-minded. It's a tool the patriarchy uses, of course. So people complain about their kids or they complain about the pain of birth or they make motherhood kitschy, Mother's Day-y.

I became a writer because I am the youngest of six children. I listen; I observe. I'm camouflaged as a moth. Mothers are unseen. It helps me write.

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

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.