Quote

I started reading contemporary fiction in college or right after college. It wasn't as if I was steeped in experimental minimalism when I was twelve or something. I was reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond.

Leni Zumas

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Leni Zumas
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Fiction
Minimalism
Wasn
Pond
Started
Ponds
Reading
Experimental
Right
Witch
Something
Twelve
Blackbird
Contemporary
Blackbirds
College
Steeped

More quotes by Leni Zumas

Image
I am fascinated by tiny, incremental changes, almost imperceptible shifts in how people orient themselves in the world, because those are in some ways the most hopeful.
Leni Zumas
Image
There's relief in white space for the reader.
Leni Zumas
Image
If a synesthetic person says the letter a is green, it can't ever be anything but green.
Leni Zumas
Image
So often we think of a wound or a loss as making a person feel more deeply, become a better person. But I don't think that always happens. I think it can constrict people's lives, especially if they don't push beyond it.
Leni Zumas
Image
In general, teaching writing makes me a far better reader because there's so many ways to write a good sentence or a good story, and as a teacher I'm obliged to consider them all, rather than staying in the safety of my own tendencies.
Leni Zumas
Image
I find myself writing protagonists who do feel pretty cut off from others but who want to make connections and aren't very good at it.
Leni Zumas
Image
I'm always interested in encountering people who are synesthetic and seeing how they experience things.
Leni Zumas
Image
Even while I was working on the novel I would also write short stories as relief, just to be in a wieldier world that could negotiated more easily and more quickly. In the novel, I even changed the narrator from a man to a woman.
Leni Zumas
Image
Sometimes you just feel like you could work forever on something and never know when it's done.
Leni Zumas
Image
Part of being a writer is feeling that constant dissatisfaction, thinking about what else you could do, and also knowing when it's time to leave a project.
Leni Zumas
Image
In my short stories there's a lot of focus on people successfully and not successfully responding to some sorts of discomforts or instabilities.
Leni Zumas
Image
Another obligation that I have as a teacher is to make available to students a range of options and devices and approaches, rather than saying well here's one way to do it and that's the only way that's good.
Leni Zumas
Image
It just fascinates me, those private mechanisms that we use to make sense of the world - whether they have to do with the five senses or not. I think literature is one of the only kinds of art that truly lets us into that.
Leni Zumas
Image
As someone who played music and never got famous, and remembers little fragments of that, I don't remember life as a dramatic flamboyant thing.
Leni Zumas
Image
For me, the genders are an essential element of numbers and letters, not something that could be removed from them.
Leni Zumas
Image
I felt sure about wanting to look at a person's life that had been limited or damaged, but not necessarily ennobled, by loss.
Leni Zumas