And it’s interesting that the writing I tend to think of as “good” is good because it’s mysterious. It tends to happen when I get out of the way—when I let it go a little bit, I surprise myself. I feel most pleased with my language when I don’t understand it completely.

writers sometimes call the “As you know, Bob,” paragraph, in which you do this big info dump. There’s pleasure in working it out. Besides, brief, understated descriptions tend to better serve the lens of character. Real people don’t think of things in quite so many adverbs, or adjectives.

Memorization was a way for me to force myself to be more precise, and to forge a more permanent relationship to the words.

if I had to narrow down the greatest gratitude of my university years, it would be reading Toni Morrison—specifically, reading Beloved. Perhaps more than any other text, Beloved made me the person I am. It’s the book that altered my personal and creative DNA.

I think “I’m in the reservation of my mind” has an incredibly destructive connotation for me now. It’s apocalyptic, when I think about it. The human journey has always been about movement. And a century ago, when we moved onto the reservation, my tribe stopped moving. All the innovation we’ve done since then has been just modeling after Europeans.

Poetry privileges subjectivity. It foregrounds the interior life of the writer, who is trying to draw in a reader. And it gets readers into contact with their own subjective life.

sticking with the sentences that give a subtle feeling that there’s something more to say. This means I’ve hit on something unconscious enough to write about—something with enough unknown in there to be brought out.

the first sentence is the handshake, on either side of the writer-reader divide.

The white wall (once of paper, now of pixels) will only open to the right key,