Susan Briante

“When writing my second book, Utopia Minus, I became obsessed with landscape and cultural memory. I was taking tours in my mind. I love falling asleep somewhere over Kansas and waking up on the tarmac in San Francisco. But I also relish the process of taking things mile by mile, word by word, to notice every historical marker, strip mall, roadside curiosity, to savor every preposition, verb, clause. A glimpse from a jet plane like any good fragment can illuminate, but a sentence leads us step by step through the procedures of thought and syntax.”