It Blew My Mind, Reading Swing Time,

When You Write An Essay, Of Course You're Going To Get Pushback, But You're Going To Be Allowed To Make Your Case At Leisure. You're Going To Be Allowed To Take Into Account Possible Objections And To Fully Humanize Your Reader. That Feels To Me Like A Much More Sane Thing To Do.

Reading Is A Form Of Prayer, A Guided Meditation That Briefly Makes Us Believe We're Someone Else, Disrupting The Delusion That We're Permanent And At The Center Of The Universe. Suddenly (we're Saved!) Other People Are Real Again, And We're Fond Of Them.

I Love The Idea That More People Would Read Short Fiction. I Think It's Such A Humanizing Form. It Softens The Boundaries Between People.

My Idea About Collections Is That You Write As Hard As You Can For Some Period And What You're Really Doing During That Time Is Hyper-focusing On The Individual Pieces - Trying To Make Each One Sit Up And Really Do Some Surprising Work.

I'm Not A Natural Criticizer - I Prefer To Like And Praise And So On.