I’m often told my books are “architectural.” I suspect people mean this any number of ways, and are responding to their materials, form, and imagery, as well as knowledge of who made them.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned in architecture school was the habit of thinking about buildings as a series of spaces one moves through. Expansion and contraction, variety and repetition, open-endedness and closure: all these abstractions that lend form and order to a design are ultimately felt on a visceral level. In the end, what matters is movement, memory, and perception.

Having learned to visualize the paths through a building in this way, it’s natural to interpret other experiences in a similar fashion: to read a city, canyon, poem, garden, or book as a fluid series of spaces. For me, the books unfold a bit like the rooms of a cryptic, unfinished house. I begin them unsure of where they will take me or what they will contain.