I consider the trees and my mother’s face, her frizz and her unplaceable expression on her fiftieth birthday. In my fiction I go back to these things, the anxieties and the pleasures of the mundane. The stories I admire are inspired by this kind of banality but they are not dull. I believe there is something unusual, essential and maybe even pivotal in the “filler” parts of stories — those scenes that might be cut in revision. My fiction explores this unusual banality. It celebrates “filler” as well as its defamiliarization. Often, my characters and subject matter are not looking forward but looking back. Their own stories are filtered through memory’s prism where the mundane takes on more urgent relevance and significance, and where the mundane has the potential to function as a site of reconciliation and reparation. Many of my stories share the same bedrock — they are quiet, rhythmic and I want them to taste like this, like the sudden memory of an unplaceable and unshakeable expression.