Latest Leni Zumas Quotes from Interviews

• Portland is a pretty magnificent place to live.

  Leni Zumas

  Portland, Places To Live, Magnificent

  Source: therumpus.net

• Sometimes you just feel like you could work forever on something and never know when it's done.

  Leni Zumas

  Forever, Done, Sometimes

  Source: therumpus.net

• As someone who played music and never got famous, and remembers little fragments of that, I don't remember life as a dramatic flamboyant thing.

  Leni Zumas

  Littles, Remember, Dramatic

  Source: therumpus.net

• I cut hundreds of pages from my book because I felt myself being reiterative or redundant. Sometimes I wanted to leave just hints of things.

  Leni Zumas

  Book, Cutting, Hints

  Source: therumpus.net

• I am fascinated by tiny, incremental changes, almost imperceptible shifts in how people orient themselves in the world, because those are in some ways the most hopeful.

  Leni Zumas

  People, Hopeful, World

  Source: therumpus.net

• In my short stories there's a lot of focus on people successfully and not successfully responding to some sorts of discomforts or instabilities.

  Leni Zumas

  People, Focus, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

• I find myself writing protagonists who do feel pretty cut off from others but who want to make connections and aren't very good at it.

  Leni Zumas

  Writing, Cutting, Connections

  Source: therumpus.net

• Whether consciously or unconsciously, I felt myself drawn to writing a female character who was pretty flawed and not very virtuous or wonderful or attractive in these ways that throughout literary history we've come to expect female characters to be.

  Leni Zumas

  Writing, Character, Way

  Source: therumpus.net

• I'm always interested in encountering people who are synesthetic and seeing how they experience things.

  Leni Zumas

  People, Seeing

  Source: therumpus.net

• If a synesthetic person says the letter a is green, it can't ever be anything but green.

  Leni Zumas

  Letters, Green, Persons

  Source: therumpus.net

• It just fascinates me, those private mechanisms that we use to make sense of the world - whether they have to do with the five senses or not. I think literature is one of the only kinds of art that truly lets us into that.

  Leni Zumas

  Art, Thinking, Five Senses

  Source: therumpus.net

• I have what I came to find in my research is a mild form of synesthesia, though I never would have labeled it as such. It's how I think about numbers and letters. They all have inherent genders.

  Leni Zumas

  Thinking, Numbers, Research

  Source: therumpus.net

• For me, the genders are an essential element of numbers and letters, not something that could be removed from them.

  Leni Zumas

  Numbers, Essentials, Elements

  Source: therumpus.net

• Synesthesia has interested me for a long time, both as a literary device and as a puncturing of the membranes that organize how the world comes into someone's head.

  Leni Zumas

  Long, World, Membranes

  Source: therumpus.net

• Giving the reader the space to move around and be active, and encourage their active response is important to me. That will connect the reader more to the text.

  Leni Zumas

  Moving, Space, Giving

  Source: therumpus.net

• There's relief in white space for the reader.

  Leni Zumas

  White, Space, Relief

  Source: therumpus.net

• Even in so-called realist or conventional writing there can be defamiliarization.

  Leni Zumas

  Writing, Realist, Conventional

  Source: therumpus.net

• Another obligation that I have as a teacher is to make available to students a range of options and devices and approaches, rather than saying "well here's one way to do it and that's the only way that's good."

  Leni Zumas

  Teacher, Way, Students

  Source: therumpus.net

• In undergraduate classes, I often see writers who are still simply imitating. I mean, we all imitate - that's how we learn to speak or write in the first place - but they're writing a Dean Koontz novel or something.

  Leni Zumas

  Writing, Mean, Class

  Source: therumpus.net

• I don't know whose sensibility I'm responding to. Until someone starts pushing against what they've inherited and starts making their own decisions about language, it's difficult.

  Leni Zumas

  Decision, Pushing, Language

  Source: therumpus.net

• When I watch students make particular decisions about language, structure, and form, it sharpens my own thinking and my own development as a writer.

  Leni Zumas

  Thinking, Decision, Watches

  Source: therumpus.net

• I started reading contemporary fiction in college or right after college. It wasn't as if I was steeped in experimental minimalism when I was twelve or something. I was reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond.

  Leni Zumas

  Reading, College, Contemporary Fiction

  Source: therumpus.net

• In general, teaching writing makes me a far better reader because there's so many ways to write a good sentence or a good story, and as a teacher I'm obliged to consider them all, rather than staying in the safety of my own tendencies.

  Leni Zumas

  Teacher, Teaching, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

• There's always something else to work on and different solutions to these problems in the next thing. We each have a certain set of obsessions which we each cycle through.

  Leni Zumas

  Different, Next, Problem

  Source: therumpus.net

• In my writing classes, I don't outlaw any genre writing.

  Leni Zumas

  Writing, Class, Outlaw

  Source: therumpus.net

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