I write in layers, like a mollusk depositing mother-of pearl, adding and sifting and polishing. In practice, that means many drafts, subtracting, cutting, then adding again. The human compulsion to decorate, complicate, to make the most basic, needful elements or tools of our lives a little fancier captivates me. I am interested in the borders between the real and the unreal, in our projections of ourselves onto stages of our own making, our attempts to control our reflections in the eyes of others. I enjoy detective fiction, satire, sharp realism, and whimsy.
I write feminist climate fiction, understanding climate to be social as well as environmental, and climate change as both incremental and catastrophic. Finding inspiration in nature photography and collage art, I strive for clarity and reinvention, a repurposing of the familiar.
Writing is a means both to record and to understand. Touchstones for me include precision, preservation, urgency, light, and repair. I describe as precisely as I can the beauty of the natural world and the variety of human community. I write out of a sense of play, an enjoyment of the sounds of words cascading and doubling back and allowing themselves to be bent out of shape before they spring free. I build images drawn from memory, nature, and observation. My stories express my fascination with small shifts and differences, details, discrepancies, digressions. I am interested in the role of the observer, the interpreter or witness whose presence is never neutral, even when they don’t directly intervene. I write out of a sense that words are both material and fleeting, fixed yet malleable. I write to make my friends laugh. I write from habit and persistence and hope.