Why I write across genres

People ask me, kindly, whether writing across so many genres is a strategy. It isn't. It's what happens when the same handful of questions refuse to sit inside one form.

Some things are best asked as a story. Some things are best asked as a poem, which is a story with the connective tissue removed. Some things need the flat lamp of an essay. And some things are so practical that the only honest form for them is a small self-help book with a clear step you can actually do on a Wednesday.

So the shelf ends up looking wide, and the writer ends up looking indecisive. But it's the same shelf. It's just built out of the different woods a question grows in.