What books are on your nightstand?

I’ve always got a stack on the go. New and old. I read creative nonfiction most. Right now, the hybrid memoir Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara and the essay collection Studio of the Voice by Marcia Aldrich. For fiction: Orbital by Samantha Harvey and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. Low, poems by Nick Lowe. And the most recent issues the Colorado Review and The Sun and Jane Alison’s craft book, Meander, Spiral, Explode.

What’s the last great book you’ve read?

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey. It was published in 2010, but I only read it recently. Bailey covers a year she spent in a small cottage in the countryside struggling with a mysterious, debilitating illness that left her bedridden. She spends hours watching a woodland snail wander to and from the terrarium on her bedside table. It’s a captivating narrative with remarkable craft—braided, researched, and quiet. I’ve been thinking about quiet writing a lot lately, in my teaching and in my own writing. Bailey’s memoir is an exquisite example.

Have you ever gotten in trouble for reading a book?

I remember worrying that my mother would be mad if she knew that I was reading Judy Blume’s YA novel, Are You Their God It’s Me, Margaret. I got it from the school library and hid it. We weren’t a family that spoke about periods, bras, boys or religion beyond the one I was raised in, Roman Catholicism. That book helped me to grow up and into myself. I hate to see it banned along with many other important books for young readers.