Leni Zumas
It just fascinates me, those private mechanisms that we use to make sense of the world - whether they have to do with the five senses or not. I think literature is one of the only kinds of art that truly lets us into that.Collection: Art
Giving the reader the space to move around and be active, and encourage their active response is important to me. That will connect the reader more to the text.Collection: Moving
The act of language or the act of denying language carries its own heaviness.Collection: Language
Synesthesia has interested me for a long time, both as a literary device and as a puncturing of the membranes that organize how the world comes into someone's head.Collection: Long
There's relief in white space for the reader.Collection: White
Another obligation that I have as a teacher is to make available to students a range of options and devices and approaches, rather than saying "well here's one way to do it and that's the only way that's good."Collection: Teacher
Even in so-called realist or conventional writing there can be defamiliarization.Collection: Writing
I don't know whose sensibility I'm responding to. Until someone starts pushing against what they've inherited and starts making their own decisions about language, it's difficult.Collection: Decision
In undergraduate classes, I often see writers who are still simply imitating. I mean, we all imitate - that's how we learn to speak or write in the first place - but they're writing a Dean Koontz novel or something.Collection: Writing
I started reading contemporary fiction in college or right after college. It wasn't as if I was steeped in experimental minimalism when I was twelve or something. I was reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond.Collection: Reading
When I watch students make particular decisions about language, structure, and form, it sharpens my own thinking and my own development as a writer.Collection: Thinking
Portland is a pretty magnificent place to live.Collection: Portland
So often we think of a wound or a loss as making a person feel more deeply, become a better person. But I don't think that always happens. I think it can constrict people's lives, especially if they don't push beyond it.Collection: Loss
Even while I was working on the novel I would also write short stories as relief, just to be in a wieldier world that could negotiated more easily and more quickly. In the novel, I even changed the narrator from a man to a woman.Collection: Writing
There's always something else to work on and different solutions to these problems in the next thing. We each have a certain set of obsessions which we each cycle through.Collection: Different
In my writing classes, I don't outlaw any genre writing.Collection: Writing
In general, teaching writing makes me a far better reader because there's so many ways to write a good sentence or a good story, and as a teacher I'm obliged to consider them all, rather than staying in the safety of my own tendencies.Collection: Teacher
Part of being a writer is feeling that constant dissatisfaction, thinking about what else you could do, and also knowing when it's time to leave a project.Collection: Thinking
As someone who played music and never got famous, and remembers little fragments of that, I don't remember life as a dramatic flamboyant thing.Collection: Littles
Sometimes you just feel like you could work forever on something and never know when it's done.Collection: Forever
I cut hundreds of pages from my book because I felt myself being reiterative or redundant. Sometimes I wanted to leave just hints of things.Collection: Book
In my short stories there's a lot of focus on people successfully and not successfully responding to some sorts of discomforts or instabilities.Collection: People
I am fascinated by tiny, incremental changes, almost imperceptible shifts in how people orient themselves in the world, because those are in some ways the most hopeful.Collection: People
Whether consciously or unconsciously, I felt myself drawn to writing a female character who was pretty flawed and not very virtuous or wonderful or attractive in these ways that throughout literary history we've come to expect female characters to be.Collection: Writing
I find myself writing protagonists who do feel pretty cut off from others but who want to make connections and aren't very good at it.Collection: Writing
I'm always interested in encountering people who are synesthetic and seeing how they experience things.Collection: People
If a synesthetic person says the letter a is green, it can't ever be anything but green.Collection: Letters
For me, the genders are an essential element of numbers and letters, not something that could be removed from them.Collection: Numbers
I have what I came to find in my research is a mild form of synesthesia, though I never would have labeled it as such. It's how I think about numbers and letters. They all have inherent genders.Collection: Thinking
I felt sure about wanting to look at a person's life that had been limited or damaged, but not necessarily ennobled, by loss.Collection: Loss