What book feels like home to you?

“Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. I probably read that book a dozen times as a teenager, and I felt like I was a different person every time. I find rereading to be such an interesting combination of both familiarity and self-discovery. I never realize how much I’ve changed until I reread a beloved book and notice all these differences in perspective. I think that’s what home is, a safe place you can always return to and reminisce over, while appreciating that its constancy also allows you to mark all the ways you’ve grown and changed.”

What’s your most unusual writing habit?

“I don’t feel like I have many. I put off writing for a long time because I didn’t have the perfect environment for it and when I finally made myself stop daydreaming about my idyllic writing life and just start, it was on my phone with a sleeping baby in my arms, or else anytime I had a minute to pull my phone and tap down a few sentences.”

What is your favourite word to use in prose?

“Probably limned. I don’t use it a lot, but I can’t help myself from sneaking it in from time to time. It’s not a crutch word that slips in by accident—I’m always excruciatingly aware that I’m using it, but it expresses something I find so visually beautiful, that I can’t help it even though I'm like, ‘Honestly, does this character really need to be limned in sunlight right now?’”

Where do you most like to write?

“At my desk. I try to write in bed sometimes, or on the couch, but lately I find the need to be disciplined and intentional, so I’m sitting down to write or else my productivity is awful.”

What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever researched for a story?

“I needed to write an amputation scene from the perspective of a surgeon, so after reading multiple articles about the methods for field surgery and watching several video demonstrations on cadavers, I went to the grocery store and bought a leg of lamb, because I wanted to get an idea of what it would physically feel like to cut through muscle and into bone.”

If your characters could critique you, what would they say?

“Please stop giving us trauma, we have enough.”