"My stories often start with some image or moment that stays with me... It could be something I experienced, or a conversation I overheard, or the way someone looked at someone else… I will usually just start writing toward that image or moment and build from there."

“Because I could not see what she saw, / I invented the burning city that gives no heat, / I planted the pillar of salt that is no resource, / And now, as their shadows wave at my feet, / I imagine the horrified look she gave / And salvage her look that has turned from me.”

“It’s just half an hour, / it’s just a marriage, just a week’s worth of sex, it’s just / easier to move my thumb along the screen protector / like it’s tender, it’s just grief after grief after / your kid at a baseball game after grief after gif / after grief”

“Alison is surreptitious and likes to take her time relaxing into her approach. When she is in her jumpsuit I know that she is not Alison, or even Alison playing the role of a cat. She is a cat.”

“I just want to tear away everything / that is irrelevant, and love you like a broken lever”

“always save the marriage / i want to be saved too”

“He loved the sense that sex could be an intervention between two people.”

“It was more than ten years ago that he ceded the master bedroom to her and moved his things into the downstairs guest room.”

Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and the dissolution of a modern marriage.