I remember the first time I was frustrated by not having the right words. I was ten. I was in middle school. I was wracked in vague existential crisis. I was losing sleep and valuable Power Ranger viewing time over whether my choices were my own, or just other peoples’ choices foisted on me in their desire to control me. I had the vague sensation that doors I couldn’t even see yet were being shut to me.

I was truly afraid that the decisions I was making, or were being made for me, were closing off a million other life decisions. And it was true, then. As it is for all of us, every day.

That I actually wanted to do something about it makes me sure of one thing: that I was way wiser and smarter at ten than I am at twenty-nine.

I was in the car, trying to express this frustration to my dad, and I remember my inability to tell him what I meant. I had the image in my head and the feeling in my chest, but translating them into words? Impossible.

Sure – I had gotten over the obvious limitations. The sheer physical facts. I would never be a pharaoh or a Mayan king, as sick as that would have been. I wouldn’t discover a new barrier reef or capture the giant squid on film, because I was pretty terrified of the ocean. I knew it was too late to be an astronaut; I probably wouldn’t be a dancer. I would never be an Olympian.

I already knew I had to use my brain for the rest of my life in some way, and on top of that, had some weird obligation to generations of family to do so. Freaking sweet. I saw a future of this:

But the real frustration wasn’t just about uniforms and crowns that I wouldn’t ever get to wear. I had a total, throat-stopping panic that there were entire worlds of experiences I wasn’t going to have access to because I was buttoned, suited up, and barreled into some tidy future of clean repute and respectability. I was too young to have the words for what those experiences were, but the sensation was real enough for me to remember, in ways, over the next twenty years.

If I could have expressed it then, I would have said the bay doors to the space shuttle to a whole neon diamond string of galaxies with endless days had been shut sealed. And the access code was in hieroglyphic mash in a language that I would never learn. O Woe! Little Me thought.

Now, it seems ridiculous and amazing that I was thinking about my celestial fate of fates instead of playing with dolls or cars or digging holes in the mud, or whatever normal kids did. I was a very lonely little person, a machine of high achievement who made everyone around her happy with her success, and their happiness ostensibly made her happy, in an endless, grotesque candy loop.

I was in six different clubs at any time. I was editing the school paper and testing the effects of gamma radiation on plants and balling with my nerd self at science fairs. I was playing the piano for four hours a day. On the weekends, I would go to the Corcoran School in the big city to take an adult nude figure drawing class with a slew of other grown adults. I’m only disturbed now by that memory.

Back in the car, a broken record, I asked my dad: “What about all the other things I want to be? That are being closed off? Because of the choices being made for me now? What things won’t I know?” I kept repeating the questions, because I was desperate to find a way to tell him about the fear I was feeling and seeing in my dumb little heart.

The ultimate question at the core was: How do I know that I’ve chosen this life for myself? And that I haven’t just been convinced these are my choices?

I don’t remember his answer, but it was probably something incredibly cryptic, as always. Today, he’ll send texts that are meant to be comforting but instead read like bad omens: “We’re just detritus, flotsam on time’s river” (an actual text) or, my favorite:

“If it’s any comfort, our sun will eventually die and Earth will cease to exist. What matters if this is going to happen in a time frame that you care about.”

Ehl-oh-ehl: horrendous. Chew on that, little girl. So, sure. Our sun will become a red giant several thousand times its current size. Seven and something billion years from now, there will likely be no trace of our race having existed. Maybe we’ll have made it. I have some faith that we’ll make it! Sure! We might! But we probably won’t.

At most, a diamond that holds a memory card with the library of human knowledge within it will be carried within the tides of lava.

Truly, that thought doesn’t depress me. That everything will eventually disappear makes the whole drama of human existence that much more heady and incredible and ineffable enough to just weep with gratitude.

When I look at the stars I don’t feel how small we are, but how large and god-like we are. Each of us, able to create. Each of us, a creature that can think on the stars, that can think about our place in the universe…and then can talk about the stars to another creature…Incredible! That we’ve found words for the stars and ideas to describe the birth of the universe and entire systems of thought to support that idea is something to clap wildly for every day.

So, the moments that I have no words for first make me grateful to be alive. They make me grateful to be a creator in my own small way, because I can try and magic up words to express them.

When I think about what really motivates me as a writer, and why I’ve chosen this little road of the many other paths I could have taken, it is all the things (yikes) that I have no good words for. I don’t know how to describe love. I don’t know how to describe prayer. I don’t know how to describe music. I don’t know how to describe making art. The list only grows by the day.

But the joy is that you learn, slowly, how to describe things over time in your own language.

For about eight years I had a seriously insane immersion in electronic dance music. The music, the culture, being around it, consuming it, was a singular and hopeless obsession. I’d stand in line for eight hours for tickets to Timewarp, or fly by myself across the country to see Squarepusher for a single night, neglecting all responsibilities.

What I loved most was that I couldn’t really verbalize how important the sound was to me. I began writing an essay about Detroit house music and the city’s techno pioneers for a magazine, and had an impossible time describing the very sound, feelings and experience I knew so well. I tried reading music reviews. The witty, delicate descriptions of many relied more on contextual descriptions about the history, personality and influences of and on a musician than the music itself. This was interesting, but not the approach I wanted to take.

Describing the actual sound of bass underneath seventeen different alien loops of horns, gleeps and zurps that created more emotion and hope in me than a real person could was a matter of blind stabbing with the pen. I was forced to come up with metaphors and images that I couldn’t trust in fully, but had to if I wanted a byline. I kept relapsing to describing the crowd of thousands, how others acted in response to the sound, how fans struggled to explain why a certain set was so heavy or deep. All the elements around the sound, but never the sound directly. Because there were no words for it.

Every day I see something I am thrilled to recognize I have no words for. This happened on a visit last week to the Boston Ballet to see a performance of Wayne McGregor’s 2006 Chroma. On stage against stark white, five dancers in pink and nude slips were jerking, scissoring and jackknifing, their bodies in shapes of bellows, of an octopus full before pistoning away, of birds of paradise. Body, a coiled muscle to strike. Bodies wind-milling bodies in the air.

But I smiled happily throughout, even as those words came to mind. The words weren’t enough. I couldn’t describe what I was seeing.

There is nothing I want to do more than find words for the experiences that are hardest to describe.

If that fails, well, you know. Our sun will eventually die, and the Earth will cease to exist.

My feelings about living in Boston at this particular moment become harder to articulate by the hour. My clarity of thought is impeded by little sleep. But, I hear the train starting in again, its rush from downtown, and I’ve never been happier to hear it. Along with so many others, I’ve been up since 3 this morning, contacting students and colleagues to tell them to stay home. Friends in Watertown called me to describe the sight of armored cars trawling their streets. The glut of traumatic images flood every sense channel and the very limit of emotional capacity.

I know I am not alone in having felt disenfranchised, overwhelmed and completely helpless much of this week. I’m most overwhelmed by the underlying sensation that such events that are out of my control, and such violence, beyond my scope of comprehension, will continue to warp our lives and sense of safety in coming years.

Along with many others, I’ve been thinking about Boston, its complexity and its resilience. Many have written eloquently about this city and its people in the last days. For me, to see such mindless destruction in a city that celebrates and organizes itself around the life of the mind is jarring on a number of levels. It hits viscerally, of course, as we sat inside, trembling and unsure. It hits emotionally, as we read the recounts of the injured and saw the faces of the families of the dead. The violence of the last week strikes at the heart of what this city quite literally stands for: creativity, the pursuit of knowledge and progress.

In 2001, I crowded into a little dorm room with fifteen or so other Harvard freshmen to watch the news footage of the towers falling. Then, as now, the images were difficult to process as real. In the decade that followed: we studied, we persisted, we graduated, we got more degrees, we went on to work and play in the big world. And in that time, our political process became increasingly schizophrenic. Today, entire American towns are going bankrupt. Our social and civic infrastructure is fraying. As one person pointed out, we lock down the whole city of Boston, but we won’t allow a five minute check on gun buyers.

My ambivalent relationship with Boston proper has morphed into one of begrudging respect, even love. This city is where many of us realized, as students, what we were made of. I learned what I want to do with my life – teach and write. Here is where I encountered great minds. It is where I met my dearest friends, individuals with unstoppable ambition and huge, unwieldy dreams. Friends who went on to become artists, doctors, public defenders, poets, environmental activists and financiers. Working here, now, I’m ever reminded of that ethic stretching back some three hundred years, an ethic you see in the stone and lines of libraries, museums, schools….

What is left to glean in the wake of such frenzy? For one, a deep sense of community here: the police officers, fire fighters, ambulance drivers, the doctors, nurses and selfless people who threw themselves at the problems without really thinking of themselves. They were thinking of their mission; they were thinking, as Lincoln once described this, with the better angels of their nature.

What is left, are the relationships and the act of relating, all the bonds we make and choose to invest in. What is left is all of the people who have helped us to get to where we are. I didn’t make it here by myself. None of us made it to where we are without our parents and families; without our teachers who gave us their time and insights; without our colleagues; and of course, without our friends, who sustained us in thousands of thankless, unspeakable ways with their support and their belief.

I wish I had the courage to say something grand here, like, We Will Persevere, but I’m not sure how we will. I’ll have to follow, like others, in the great steps of those with more courage. I wish I could even be sure that just living to tomorrow, that being unafraid is “enough,” and will “show them,” but I do not feel sure. The fear is very much still there.

But I do hope I can honor the city that molded me by living the best life I can, and by bringing Boston and its ethic, its striving, to the rest of the world in some way. I really do hope that is enough.

After interviewing David Gaider, lead writer at Bioware, I wrote a piece about the experience of conversation, trust and belief in game characters, through the title Dragon Age: Origins. The artist Louis Roskosch completed the lovely illustrations for this piece.

This article for Kill Screen’s Intimacy issue can be read here: Talking, Thinking, Believing. I hope to hear your thoughts!

Thanks to Ryan Kuo and Chris Dahlen, both phenomenal editors!

I may be going to New Orleans fairly soon. The last month has been consumed with research about the city’s architecture for a very short piece. As a New Englander by birth  (wearing riding boots and tippling a little tumbler as I say that), the draw of a city that is ruinously soaked in gin and bourbon and jazz is, well, titillating. I wasn’t disappointed. The story of the city’s architecture was so thick and so rich that I frequently had to set down the huge books I had checked out because of an overwhelming migraine.

Surely, the migraine was partly induced by my chronic lack of decent sleep, but also by pages and pages of stunning, glossy pictures of city blocks in the French Quarter. The transition from just one Creole-style cottage to a Greek revival hotel – side by side on the same block – formed a step between centuries and sensibilities. After the city’s great fire in 1788, the entire aesthetic of the city’s buildings began to change.

The more I learned about this history, as it happens, the more hapless and ill-equipped I felt to write about it. How could I possibly write about New Orleans? Who was I to try?

This process happens frequently to me: 1) Over-researching so I won’t, hopefully, do any injustice to a subject; 2) Gleefully learning about places I’ve never been and people I’ve never met, which is fairly typical for history loons; 3) The onset of a debilitating mental paralysis, as the prospect of tackling any Thing or Event in the right way looms ahead.

Usually, I try to approach challenging subjects – the Thing – as though I were a two-inch high explorer. Clamber over the Thing as though it were a jungle gym. There must be a way to walk towards the Thing from a different perspective! Or, I try to shrink the Subject. If New Orleans was cast in miniature and sitting on a round table, I would walk around it and look at it from the ocean-side, or from its industrial side, or from above.

When you peel open Google Maps, you have the disconcerting vision of thousands of rooftops, and the paired recognition that this is not how we really get to see most cities. And roofs, you learn, are often in disrepair. The sight of a rusting roof is sometimes grotesque, sometimes beautiful, always sad.

Perhaps, I thought, I could tackle the city of New Orleans – and our romance of its decay – by starting with the roofs. Looking more closely at the buildings, I thought of the images of New Orleans we have received through literature - Eudora Welty, Faulkner, Tennessee Williams. That image is a romantic one, of a city in permanent decay. Why decay?

In decay and decline we find the story of what had been made, how it was made, and why it was abandoned. Rough, industrial cities, like Baltimore or Detroit, give stories of human vitality within urban decline. Right now, I live in a  mid-sized industrial town outside of Boston. I am close to an abandoned shipyard, Fore River, which used to construct some of the greatest naval vessels of World War One and Two. When I walk through the shipyard and look at the docked destroyers, dignified in mucky fish-dead water, I am learning about why humans make things at all.

What came of all this musing? Well, I’m not sure what the etiquette is for previewing a piece that I’ve written on my own site without seeming self-promotional. I don’t think there is any way. Hopefully, if you’re a writer,  and reading this, you understand this anxiety. I did think I could give you a few of the opening paragraphs, which made more sense than summarizing what I’ve already written:

“When copper oxidizes, it gives us very calming bluish-green called verdigris. This patina is often so thick that the copper beneath is protected from corroding any further. The pigment was used hundreds of years ago in paints; it is also poisonous. The Statue of Liberty was once a bright, flawless copper.

Verdigris is the word I thought of most through Infamous 2, along with corrosion. As Cole McGrath, a parkour world champion with electrokinetic powers, I channel electricity; I course on its force across the open world of New Marais. The city is a model of New Orleans—a former industrial port giant in a complete, unapologetic state of decay. I am forced to engage with the meaning of decay in a city we all know, today, is suffering from near-criminal neglect.

The rooftops are my first play space. Up here, deep cobalt tiles have turned strange, fluorescent colors from mold and wear and wet. Moss edges yellow flowers of grime. I see sights I had never imagined before in 28 years: that the water pipes on roofs are not metal, but an astonishing length of oxidized blue, that a tin roof layered over years looks like a patchwork history of the stages of rust.

As I clamber down from the roofs, I become intimate with the textures of concrete, stucco, wood, brick, iron, and tin. I leap to a lamppost, and then tether myself to a tram line and catapult around New Marais. I grind heavily along wires, along streetcar lines, up wired pipes. I see the veins and guts of buildings as they blow apart in combat: steel girders, drainage pipes, all running down to the thick brick piers on unsteady swamp land. I know the courses of water, energy, gas, and oil, the magnificent understructure above which the city hums.”

To read more, head over to this brief essay, Dealing With Urban Decay, at Kill Screen. Don’t worry if you don’t play games; the essay is about a city, more than anything. I’m looking forward to your feedback and thoughts, as always.

I wrote this story a while back while in my first workshop class with Marilynne Robinson, nearly six (Jesus Christ) years ago at Iowa. It also was my first published story. Because we all know how popular literary journals are, I got permission from Hunger Mountain to preview a bit of it here, and would be grateful to hear your thoughts. Though my writing and my interests have evolved drastically in the time in between, it does remain emblematic, for me, of a specific time in my life, when I felt short stories were about cobbling together scenes that made emotional sense.

I also learned that I need to give up my dogged resistance to having some semblance of a plot, very, very quickly. It actually is a great joy to have a plot.

I wrote a bit about isolation and madness in the game Dead Space for the journal Kill Screen. It was re-printed on Pitchfork, and you can read the piece HERE.

My most recent story, Gunn, is up at the American Literary Review. Find it HERE. Lions, churches, and strange places. ‘Twas a runner up in the journal’s 2010 Fiction contest.