It’s particularly pleasurable to read interview between writers who know each other well. Over at Oxford American, long-time friends Ada Limón and Manuel Gonzales discuss Gonzales’s new novel, The Regional Office Is Under Attack, and what it means to write with an ear to the fantastical:
When I first started writing, though, I was deep into my college career as an English major and when I went to graduate school I aped mid-century realism—Carver, Yates, O’Connor, the like—trying to write austere, terse stories of disillusionment and vague regret, but these bored me. And they probably bored my workshop instructors and everyone else, too. And then one day I got an idea for a weird story, unrealistic, not quite full of magic or the fantastic, but certainly not a story located in the real—and it was so much more fun to write than what I had been writing.
