Who I Am

I live in Washington, D.C., but I’m from the Midwest.

I love books and art and theater and music and video games and history and fairy tales and all kinds of films. I love writing about films more than I love writing about books. (Sorry!) I use humor as a coping mechanism.

I have a lot of literary heroes.  A partial list: Virginia Woolf, Diana Wynne Jones, Kelly Link, Matt Bell, Karen Russell, Carmen Maria Machado, Zora Neale Hurston, Lu Xun, Italo Calvino, Yoko Ogawa, Joy Williams, Wallace Stevens, Blake Butler, Susan Cooper, Robert Kloss, Mo Yan, Phillip K. Dick,  E. Nesbitt, Ellen Raskin, Faulkner, Ben Loory, Melville, Marlon James, Beckett, Alexander Chee, Laura van den Berg, Harold Pinter, Shirley Jackson, Muriel Spark, Christopher Durang, Mavis Gallant, Clarice Lispector, Dorothy Sayers, Rion Amilcar Scott, Dostoyevsky, Ashbery, Ionesco, Aase Berg, Karen Blixen, Kafka, Woolf, Fitzgerald, Hopkins, Sasha Fletcher, Borges. And a million others.

My political hero is the late Senator Paul Wellstone. My favorite filmmaker is Agnes Varda. My favorite colors are rose and navy. I am an unapologetic feminist, I love unions, and capitalism blows.