Leni Zumas (born 1972) is an American writer living in Portland, Oregon.
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.
In my writing classes, I don't outlaw any genre writing.
I felt sure about wanting to look at a person's life that had been limited or damaged, but not necessarily ennobled, by loss.
Sometimes you just feel like you could work forever on something and never know when it's done.
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.
I'm always interested in encountering people who are synesthetic and seeing how they experience things.
Even in so-called realist or conventional writing there can be defamiliarization.
Portland is a pretty magnificent place to live.
Even while I was working on the novel I would also write short stories as relief, just to be in a wieldier world that could negotiated more easily and more quickly. In the novel, I even changed the narrator from a man to a woman.
The act of language or the act of denying language carries its own heaviness.
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.
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.
If a synesthetic person says the letter a is green, it can't ever be anything but green.
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.
When I watch students make particular decisions about language, structure, and form, it sharpens my own thinking and my own development as a writer.
In my short stories there's a lot of focus on people successfully and not successfully responding to some sorts of discomforts or instabilities.
So often we think of a wound or a loss as making a person feel more deeply, become a better person. But I don't think that always happens. I think it can constrict people's lives, especially if they don't push beyond it.
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.
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.
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.