Interviews

To some extent, I think I was also exploring how witnessing, absorbing, and listening are related to writing, and questioning whether this is a valuable way of approaching a life. I think it can be.

As a poet, I’m constantly trying to make connections and see between and among things.

Compassion is a window, and ideally the reader feels that—even if they’re reading a character whom they don’t necessarily like—this person is a rounded character with good qualities, bad qualities, and in-between qualities.

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…

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…

. . . 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…

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…