You Can't Tell People How To Feel

Here Is The Door Of My Mom's House, Well-remembered Childhood Portal. Here Is The Yard, And A Set Of Wires That Runs From The House To A Wooden Pole, And Some Fat Birds Sitting Together On The Wires, Five Of Them Lined Up Like Beads On An Abacus.

I've Never Been Able To Sleep Very Much, Even When I Was A Kid. I Used To Hate Being Forced To Lay In Bed In The Darkness, And Just Shifting In Bed And Staring At The Shadows.

I Usually Have More Than One Thing I'm Working On At Once -- I've Been Working On Three Different Novels. When I Get Stuck On One, I Hop Back And Forth. It's Sort Of Freeing: I Can Say I'm Abandoning This Thing That I Hate Forever And I'm Moving On To Something That's Good. I'll Find That I'll Go Back To [the Other Project] In A Day Or A Week And Like It Again. But That Moment Of Wanting To Trash Something -- That Virginia Woolf Moment When You Have To Be Stopped From Filling Your Pocket With Stones -- Comes Pretty Regularly For Me. Switching Is Probably A Good Thing.

Maybe It's Because I Grew Up During The Mtv Generation, But To Me A Perfect Song Is One I Can Imagine A Music Video To, A Song That Can Take You Into A Dream.

I Started Out As A Poet Who Primarily Wanted To Write About Image And Moment. Over The Years I've Been Trying To Teach Myself How To Do Plot And Scene. My First Story Collection Had The Most Issues With The Plotlessness, And When I Was Writing My Second Collection I Was Teaching Myself How To Make Things Happen.