SmokeLong Quarterly

What inspired you to write this story?

I didn’t set out to write this story in particular. When I write, I try to write in a dream-like state and let the story emerge. Although, I have obsessions like everyone else. I write about love and death, because there is nothing more, as Emily Dickinson said. I like to write about the pain point, the tipping point, the points of connection and disconnection.

This story in particular focuses on the idea of disconnection and dissociation. The way a person can remove themselves from other people even while sitting in the same room, the same car.

I also like to include something of the context of the world in which we live—art, literature, historical events. This story uses sculptures, solid remnants of the past.

And it is almost impossible for me to resist writing something about children—my five-year-old daughter is a constant, and she usually gets in there somehow.

Where do you like to write?

At home, I have a room with a desk where I do my day job and also where I write. I scribble things down in my ordinary day and often those lines go whole, unaltered, into the work. I love the surprise of a line, a thought, that I didn’t know was there.

What are you reading now?

I am late to it, I know, but I am loving Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. I am reading it for a second time, back to back, because it is like one long line of dense, gorgeous, sweeping poetry. I cannot take it all in with one reading, and I know I won’t ever be able to.

What are you working on next?

More short stories, more flash fiction. There is a novel manuscript out there, too, which is under consideration and has always been an exercise in patience and love.

What’s for dinner?

Homemade fried rice. Yep, exotic cuisine here. It has real prawns though—fancy.