Interviews

“The border between what we want and what we risk feels so much more fragile and permeable than I want to admit. Because it’s terrifying and no fun to think about losing what you love, but working on that inside…

“I wanted to do something very different. Something more explicitly political, more deeply experimental in the sense of using metafiction, not just as a clever way of reminding the reader that they’re reading a construct, but metafiction that really digs…

“Publication is punctuation. It’s also a distraction, but it’s necessary because you want to close the circle. When you’re a storyteller or a writer that puts the work out there, having a listener, someone who receives it, completes it and…

I find revising and editing my favorite part of writing. The first draft is the most grueling, horrible part for me; I don’t know what I’m doing and just trust something’s there. But then, once you’ve got something with a…

“I was getting encouragement to bring myself into the story. That’s when I found the year-long Memoir Incubator at Grub Street. I got into the Incubator on a Tuesday. The day after that, I searched for a therapist. I knew…

“It’s been really strange to live in the world of the book for so many years and now be outside of it. It feels a little bit unfair. I want to be back in the throes of the book. I…

“The older I get, the more I want to be edited. I just want the work to be good. I don’t care as much about the how of it. I’m more willing to kill my darlings. I like the term…

“Knowing myself as a dancer first allowed me to approach poetry as an extension of that process. I receive, I observe, I allow the insides to give the experience new shape. Similar to dance, I believe good poetry is not…

“ All my books are about making art under capitalism, it’s a subject that’s dear to me as I’m a writer and my husband is an independent filmmaker and we’re trying to, you know, make art but also bring groceries…

“Do you know the Walt Whitman poem, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer?” Whitman is hearing this scientist spewing out all the facts and the figures and formulas. He gets all agitated, so he goes outside and looks up at…

“Without wanting to make things too neat, I think there is a continuity between projects insofar as maybe one could postulate the love letter is part negation of what kills us.”