America loves a good comeback story!
I once took a workshop with Jim Shepard, and he has this term, 'rate-of-revelation,' that has come to mean a lot to me: 'the pace at which we're learning crucial emotional information about the stories' central figures.' An ever-increasing rate-of-revelation is good; a stagnant r-of-r is not.
'Find Me' I think, is brooding in a very literal sense of the word in that you have all of these sort of interior storm that's growing within Joy over the course of the book and leading her to her moment. And certainly, I think there's an aspect of the supernatural.
I've always been most drawn to fiction that wrestles with that death-fear. Sometimes I joke with my students, 'If no one is in danger of dying, I'm not interested,' but of course I'm not really joking.
I am an incorrigible eavesdropper, so I am very much influenced by what I hear.
I tend to be drawn to characters who are not rule followers, who behave in unexpected and unusual ways.
To me, in general, something that's really rich in terms of identity about transit spaces is that they're so intimate. Especially thinking about long international flights when we're trying to sleep on the plane - we're total strangers, but we're sleeping next to each other.
I can't write anything if I don't know where it's set, where the events are happening - even if the details of setting are minimal.
I really need so much time to really make headway on a novel that requires me to disappear from the world in a way.
In the novels I most admire, there is this sense that, within the confines of the world, the possibilities are always opening in new and surprising ways - that was a quality I strived to capture, with the hope that the reader would be willing to follow me.
Sometimes we talk about memory as though it's firm and fixed, but of course, memory is highly fluid and subjective and thus highly subject to manipulation.
I always tell my students that, in fiction, the opening is a clue to the work's DNA: not only what it is, but what it will become, where it will lead you.
I think my concern is I know my voice, and I know the kinds of landscapes that interest me, so my primary concern is doing the most I can with those voices and those landscapes.
Children exist in the worlds that adults create for them, both locally and globally, and their options are, by virtue of age, often painfully limited.
I am temperamentally drawn to work that shoves the strange and normal against one another, it's true, although I don't see the 'strange' and the 'normal' as being two separate categories of experience; for me, they are intertwined, hard to separate.
I do not work well when I am in living in a cyclone of panic. I reject actively seeking out destabilization and suffering as a creative model.
I lived in Florida until I was 22.
As a teenager, I struggled a lot, had several major depressive episodes, and ended up dropping out of high school and getting a GED.
Paradoxically, the only thing that helps when I'm feeling despairing about writing is to write.
The short story has been here and is here and will be here as long as we are.
