Interviews

I’ve always wanted to write plot-driven novels that borrow from a lot of different traditions and institutions. That’s something I like most to read, and whenever I write something, I try to write something that I enjoy reading too.

I’m sure you’ve seen your own versions of these stories. These truths, these stories, are everywhere. Quiet, but waiting.

When you’re writing about family, there's what’s really relevant and has meaning to you. And then there’s what has meaning to the audience.

. . . the process of writing really was a devotion. It gave me a reason to keep going. And because I’m interested in formal problems, it was the crafting of sentences, finding rhythms, shaping my material that helped me to get hold of it.

While I do see there is importance in recognizing identity, I also want there to be a broader field to go beyond the identity itself, the identities that were forced upon us, in addition to what we continue to reinforce and agree upon as identity.

. . . This is a story of a family trying to find their place in a world that is constantly shifting beneath them, and I wanted them and their relationships and emotions and memories at the center of this narrative.

I think the older we get, we change, but we still love what we love. We still have the same little shames and little happies and all these things that make us us from when we first started becoming whoever we were going to be.

As a writer, I really like working with constraints and getting to play with different structures, voices, moods, and characters. The simple fact that short stories are short gives me all of that.

The poems help me to see that, for the most part, I’m just doing my best, even when my best isn’t very good and I’m confused and flailing around.

On DIRECT SUNLIGHT, the alchemy of titles and first lines, teaching, kangaroo humans, The National, and more.

I have to know all the jokers they hold in their hand so I know how they would play or hold them—and I think it’s that level of intimacy I’m constantly trying to learn as I write.