Tell us about Want:

It’s a book about a high school teacher and mother who declares bankruptcy and gets back in touch with an old friend. It’s about privilege and anger and motherhood and womanhood and friendship and whiteness and all the ways our wanting both propels us forward and hems us in.

Do you have a bird story or favorite feathered friend?

Right now, out my window, there are a handful of pigeons that seem to have made a home of the roof next to our building. In these months of being at home most of the time and spending most of the day parenting, I’ve been getting up very early to write, but as I’ve been mostly not able to write, I’ve been watching these pigeons every morning instead. They’re more beautiful than I’d realized before this. They all have some different brilliant color around their necks. They seem to have some collectivity happening, preening one another and functioning almost always as a unit. Sometimes one or two of them comes and sits on the ledge of our window, and it feels intimate and secret in a way we seem to have largely lost the opportunity to experience right now. 

What is your most memorable reading experience?

To The Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway, every time.

What makes you most excited about Want?

I think it tries to grapple, in a pretty raw and pretty unapologetic way, with all the ways many of our systems are, and have been for very long now, deeply broken. Jenny Offill described her novel Weather as a sort of Trojan horse, and I hope mine might be that in some way: to help readers see the daily and constant ramifications, for all sorts of people, of all the ways our society no longer makes space for people to live sustainable lives.

To tweet or not to tweet?

Oh man. I don’t want to tweet. I think I’m very bad at it. My husband often tells me later that my twitter jokes aren’t funny. But it’s hard to be a writer, and it’s hard to get your work out; it’s hard to maintain a sense of community without the internet right now. I’m grateful for any opportunity to be a part of a conversation around books and writing. I feel worried for all of us that it has become compulsory but also am glad for all the ways it gives both readers and writers direct access to conversations that used to be isolated to small pockets and nearly impossible to penetrate.

What books do you have in your bag right now?

Maybe like a lot of people, I’ve been reading nonfiction lately, though also mostly I’ve been reading Twitter and the news. But right now, in my bag, and on my nightstand, are The Makioka Sisters by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman.

Can you tell us your favorite rejection story?

With this book, there was a moment when I had to choose the book or the only stable thing left in my career, and I chose the book, and, though it’s hard to imagine how I would feel about that if it hadn’t turned out well enough, it felt like an important moment in my relationship to my work: I believed in what I made, and I knew enough about the industry to know that that might not really matter. I knew enough to know that I might finally feel confident that I could do this thing well, but that might never translate into a career, and I had to choose to stand behind this thing and I did. Writing is a long haul, and I expect to experience many rejections and disappointments going forward, so I’m grateful to know now that maybe I can believe in the work even when and if no one thinks I should. 

What literary journals do you love?

I love Epiphany, edited by the brilliant Rachel Lyon. I love NOON, n+1, A Public Space. I think you guys are doing great things here. I like all the journals that give writers opportunities to play and explore and reconsider what writing might be capable of.

What shakes your tail feathers?

Ha. If you only knew how uncoordinated I am. Dance parties with my kids. We’ve been spending a lot of time alone together, and we’ve taken to playing music on my phone as we go for walks around our neighborhood; we all dance and sing and people gawk at us—we also do this in the rain—and it almost always cheers all of us up. 

What advice do you have for fledgling writers?

Just keep going. This whole thing is so messy and backward and rigged and frustrating, but also, there are so many people in the book world who truly and deeply love and care about putting good books in the world. Write bad things and weird things and things that make you nervous and uncomfortable and scared. Write a hundred drafts before you think of ever showing them to anyone. Find ways to feel proud of what you’ve made on your own terms. Find language for and ideas around what it is you want to make, so you know when you’ve gotten close to making it, so you can feel a certain satisfaction in that, even if and when others fail to see it as you hoped they would.

What other eggs do you have in your basket right now?

I’m working on a book about a little girl who goes missing, about trying to make art and take care of your people while the world burns, but, mostly, right now, I talk to my pigeons, call and email my representatives, and dance in the street with my kids.