A few months ago, essayist/poet/fiction writer/superhero Ira Sukrungruang told us the following, during a guest workshop: “Don’t write like a suburb.” In other words, don’t write bulky, indistinguishable paragraphs akin to what comprises the thesis-body-conclusion essays we were taught to write in freshman English. Perhaps I’m a providential airhead, who galumphed into a graduate program without quite knowing how I did so, but I found this advice to be groundbreaking. (Suburb-detonating?) I have since made it a point to look for meaning not only in the words, but also in the physical structure of the prose on the page, much like one looks at clouds to find shapes.

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