It’s one of the most liberating things I experience in writing – letting yourself get rid of a gesture or character or plot point that always nagged, even if you couldn’t admit to yourself that...

I don’t know if what I’m seeing are worms, or where they come from, or what they might be if they’re not worms, or whether I want them to be worms or not, or what...

We think we should have to work in order to feel. We want to have our cake resist us; and then we want to eat it, too.

Though there might not be any easy answers to the problem of poverty, its most compelling scribes do not resign themselves to representation solely for the sake of those age-old verities of truth and beauty.

This is the grand fiction of tourism, that bringing our bodies somewhere draws that place closer to us, or we to it. It’s a quick fix of empathy.

Bad movies and bad writing and easy cliches still manage to make us feel things toward each other. Part of me is disgusted by this. Part of me celebrates it.

You pass the old L.A. County jail, which is surprisingly beautiful. It’s got a handsome stone facade and stately columns. The new L.A. County jail – called The Twin Towers – isn’t beautiful at all;...

Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to.

Bolivian women sewed their lips shut for days. They threaded needles through their skin to stop their speech, to show what good speaking had done them.

The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some...

Freedom from one man is just another one.

Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds.

Armchair poverty tourism has been around as long as authors have written about class. As an author, I have struggled myself with the nuances of writing about poverty without reducing any community to a catalog...

facts are aligned on shelves as well, necessarily chosen and arranged, assigned value by explanations neatly stuck where prices might have been.

Pain without cause is a pain we can’t trust. We assume it’s been chosen or fabricated.

Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context...

The global phenomenon of poverty tourism – or ‘poorism’ – has become increasingly popular during the past few years. Tourists pay to be guided through the favelas of Brazil and the shantytowns of South Africa....

We like who we become in response to injustice: it makes it easy to choose a side. Our capacity to care, to get angry, is called forth like some muscle we weren’t entirely aware we...

Imagining someone else’s pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.

I shouldn’t even be having this feeling of shame…”)

The ‘here’ of Watts is pastel houses with window gratings in curly patterns. ‘Here’ is yard sales with bins full of stuffed animals and used water guns. Here is Crips turf.

It’s easier, somehow, if there’s a reason for tragedy – lust or jealousy or hatred or revenge. We can find in these explanations an emotional tenor commensurate with the gravity of the act. There’s something...

Commonality doesn’t inoculate against hurt.

Metaphors are tiny saviors leading the way out of sentimentality, small disciples of Pound, urging “Say it new! Say it new!” It’s hard for emotion to feel flat if its language is suitably novel, to...

After finishing a draft, no matter how rough, I almost always put it aside for a while. It doesn’t matter if it’s a story or a novel, I find that when it’s still fresh in...

I loved the full heat of being drunk, like I was made of melting chocolate and spreading in all directions.

Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia – em (into) and pathos (feeling) – a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person’s pain as you’d enter another country, through immigration and customs,...

No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.

Redeeming subjects from cliche is its own pleasure and privilege.

Sure, some news is bigger news than other news. War is bigger news than a girl having mixed feelings about the way some guy fucked her and didn’t call. But I don’t believe in a...

The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but find some love in the blood.

Whenever I’ve been stuck on a project, it’s always brought me solace to the return to books that moved me in the past. It’s a nice way to get outside my own head; and it...

Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us – a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain – it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion,...

It was a look that suggested emotions happening just past your line of sight: a grief so deep you’d never be able to see it, a love so fierce it could swallow itself completely.

I’ve been lucky enough to work with extraordinary teachers along the way, and I’m excited to share what I’ve learned with graduate students at SNHU. I’m just as excited for what I’ll learn from them.

I needed people to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible. Which is a superlative kind of empathy to seek, or to supply: an empathy that rearticulates more clearly what...

Irony is easier than hopeless silence but braver than flight.