Interviews

“One of the reasons that I’ve allowed my book to exist in so many genre containers is because I’ve often felt like my own life is simultaneously a coming-of-age story, along with a surreal fabulist story, along with a medical…

“I was setting flame to not so much the particulars of life, but just the appearance of it and the rules that I was supposed to live by. Staying quiet about what happened to coming out of that lane to…

“The real magic of a piece comes out when you let a work become what it needs to become, and when you let go of original intent. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately: a lot of short stories,…

“Once I had a draft, I could step back and some of what I do love in the writing process—revision and craft, and rewriting, rewriting, rewriting—could come and help me. Writing this book felt like using guerrilla tactics to get…

“Usually, I try to make things as brief as I can (my model is one of those wind-up toys and I wind it up and drop it on the floor and it races right under the couch. The end). But…

“I think that people are actually really good at telling their stories when they’re given the power to tell it from their perspective without forcing them into a box. I wanted to create an open space. It led down some…

“When you’re writing fiction, you hide your rhythms and rhymes–but for poets, those temporal structures and sonic patterns are overt and central to what they’re trying to do. I spent many years tinkering with those structures, messing around like some…

“ I wanted poetry to do the impossible, to bridge the gap that death creates. But the more time I spent with her stories, the more time I had to acknowledge all of the ways poetry creates survival, too. I…

“I just wanted to write about these fun, spooky stories, and the way that stories become a part of a place, of the bearers and receivers of those stories, how their telling is a cycle and an inheritance. I also…

“Stories make information stick. They give our experiences shape, emotion, and meaning. That’s why I wanted this book to be practical, so anyone can take the tools of storytelling and use them in real life, at work, in school, and…

“I’ve never seen my novels as being about me. Catt is my avatar but I’m writing about the things, people, themes, and histories that are close and important to me, the things I know most intimately. I really can’t write…

“ I wanted the story to be a tight ball of yarn even though there were a million strands. It had to be tight to keep a reader’s interest, so there was an element of looping back almost like a…