For better or worse, I’m an intense person, and I’m drawn to language I can experience viscerally — language that can conjure smells and tastes and textures, that feels physical in some way. I need and employ that language because it speaks to the intensity with which I experience and interpret, not because I have any particular reverence for the shocking or the destructive. I need to be free to go to unhappy or discomfiting places when that’s where I’m going, and I relish the way language can be evocative, but it’s the evocative rather than the provocative that generally guides me.