Category: Essays

I told those students to imagine how it would feel to him if he could know that somebody had dropped out of his everyday life, knelt in the grass, and photographed his words, because they had to be shared, and shared immediately. I told them about this because I figured really, this is why we read. Really, this is why write.

After a particularly bad week, I sat at my kitchen table and read George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo. It turned out, farting ghosts and a grieving president were just what I needed. The book’s elevated vocabulary and shifting POVs are demanding, but what I found the most challenging was that it asks the reader to just be. To watch. To listen.

The advice from Henry James to writers, “Try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost,” seems quaint and misguided today. Who remembers every Tweet?

I’ve largely stopped “acting out” and have learned to speak up instead. Ironically, it was learning to just talk to other people that got my writing where I want it to be.

Once while an undergrad, I took an Autumn off to teach English in China. Packing light, the only book I brought with me was the unabridged Don Quixote, figuring that a solid 1,000 page tome would be more than enough to last my entire stay.

I read what calls to me and try not to limit myself because of preconceived ideas about genre or an arbitrary scale of literary merit. I’m writing a speculative/sci-fi novel. I write short stories and let them be as strange as they need to be.