Leni Zumas Quotes
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If a synesthetic person says the letter a is green, it can't ever be anything but green.
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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.
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For me, the genders are an essential element of numbers and letters, not something that could be removed from them.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In my short stories there's a lot of focus on people successfully and not successfully responding to some sorts of discomforts or instabilities.
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Portland is a pretty magnificent place to live.
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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.
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The act of language or the act of denying language carries its own heaviness.
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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.
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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.
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There's relief in white space for the reader.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I felt sure about wanting to look at a person's life that had been limited or damaged, but not necessarily ennobled, by loss.
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When I watch students make particular decisions about language, structure, and form, it sharpens my own thinking and my own development as a writer.
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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."
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I'm always interested in encountering people who are synesthetic and seeing how they experience things.
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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.
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In my writing classes, I don't outlaw any genre writing.
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Sometimes you just feel like you could work forever on something and never know when it's done.
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Even in so-called realist or conventional writing there can be defamiliarization.
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