I remember, after a bad fall two years ago, being in the ER while a nurse prepared to stitch up a deep cut in my chin. “You don’t have to stitch me up,” I said, hazy and concussed. “I reject the idea of a discrete, boundaried individual. Leave me open.”

Luckily, she did not listen to me. But I think often about that night, about how many times in my life, as in many people’s lives, things could have gone so differently; about how many infinite possibilities exist within every second and how improbably lucky we are to encounter the possibility we presently inhabit.

So much of my work has to do with boundaries—their porousness, their false lines and edges. Through fiction, I explore the boundaries of the body, the self, the nation, the state. Inside versus outside, flesh versus not flesh. Dream versus memory, or true versus not true. Past versus present versus future. The more I write, the more I learn to think of myself—and everything—as an assemblage of tiny bits of specificity, specificities that come, of course, from everything, that bleed and leak into each other, no matter how hard we try to hold them tight.

These are all ideas I explore more concretely through my current writing projects, which include a novel, tentatively titled Heaven, and a story collection, tentatively titled The Proper Care and Feeding of Women. The National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship is not only a life-changing vote of confidence, but will also provide the vital material resources needed to finish these debut projects and lay the foundation for new work to come. What a respite. Thank you, thank you for this unimaginable gift.