What were the origins of your first novel April & Oliver?
My sister once lived in an oceanfront apartment devastated by the 1991 Nor’easter, “The Perfect Storm.” The apartment below hers was gutted, the furniture taken out to sea. Despite evacuation orders, some residents stayed behind. I wondered what might prompt at person to take such a risk. Might someone stay not to protect what she had, but because she had nothing to lose? I sat down to write, letting curiosity lead me. As the storm mounted on the page, a young woman materialized with long dark hair, calmly watching her apartment fill with water. Through flashbacks I saw that she had recently lost her little brother, who she had helped raise. People with nothing to lose are dangerous to themselves and others. April walked onto my page, vulnerable and hurting, perilous and daring.
The next day on the subway, a woman sat down across from me. She looked and carried herself exactly as I had described in my scene. She got off at her stop and I never saw her again. She became April.
I shared the short story at the Squaw Valley Writer’s Conference, where I had the good fortune of being assigned to a critique group led by the late Ted Solotaroff. He said, “This story wants to be a novel.” And so it began. The dramatic storm scene that I had so enjoyed writing was one of the first things to be cut. I followed April’s story where she wanted to take me.
How has your upbringing colored your writing?
My parents raised us to put ourselves in other people’s shoes, which is essentially the task of a fiction writer. We were a working class family who budgeted to make the mortgage each month. The youngest, I spent a good deal of my childhood beneath a drape of forsythia in our yard where I dreamed up forest trails and wild horses. I was never bored. From an early age, writing became a tool I used to navigate my way through life, both through journal keeping and story writing. As with most households, there was turbulence, but I was fortunate to have had a more stable upbringing than most of my characters.
Where do your characters come from?
I once heard Milan Kundera say in an interview that his characters start where he leaves off. That feels right to me. You could say that each of my characters is an unmanifested aspect of my personality, a particular trait taken to an extreme. They each represent someone I might have become, but didn’t. Oliver is probably the most like me in that I’ve had to uninstall certain societal expectations in order to attune to my own inner voice – that nonlinear intuition that doesn’t follow the path of logic but is essential to getting at truth. As for April, I never worked in a bar or was beaten by a boyfriend. However, I did grow up in an environment where alcohol stunted lives, and like April, I developed radar for the loop-the-loop moods of the household. I share with her the ability to read a situation and (metaphorically speaking) duck when necessary. At rare times, my characters draw indirectly from people I’ve known. The character “Nana” in April & Oliver begins where my own grandmother left off. They bear a physical resemblance, but are ultimately more different than alike.
What is your sustaining interest? What do you like to talk about?
Nature, animals, art, physics, metaphysics, and something that is hard to label but which embodies all of the above. The word “spirituality” is too generic. I’ll call it presence, which I see as awareness of the big picture though attentiveness to the inner landscape. I like Todd Boss’s poem, “One Can Miss Mountains.” The mountain is my sustaining interest.
Who are your favorite authors?
Too many to choose! Poets: Rilke, Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds, Derek Walcott, T.S. Eliot, Mirabai, and Coleman Barks’ translations of Rumi. Fiction: Claire Keegan, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, George Saunders. I love contemporary explicators of science and the natural world: Carlo Ravelli, Ed Yong, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Donald Hoffman, and Bernardo Kastrup.
What are your favorite books of 2024 so far?
I enjoyed Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, The Vital Spark by Lisa Marchiano, and Reverse Meditations by Andrew Holecek. In my TBR pile: Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah; Night Watch by Jayne Ann Phillips, and Old Crimes by Jill McCorkle and The Hunter by Tana French.
When you write, do you edit as you work, or do you wait till the end and then polish?
When writing a first draft, I lock my editor hat in a closet. I get onto the train and keep barrelling along until the last stop. Then, I go back to the beginning and edit mercilessly. Many drafts later, virtually every sentence has changed.
Can you share a little of your current work with us?
I am working on a novel set in China during the period of the Tiananmen protests. I lived in China on and off from 1987 to 1991 as an English teacher, and kept notes about the details of life at that time. That version of China doesn’t exist anymore.
In April & Oliver, several characters have significant dreams, and there are references to mythological figures, such as Orpheus. Does your interest in Carl Jung play a role in your fiction?
I don’t believe it consciously plays a part in how I write a story, but it does influence how I understand it after the fact. From a Jungian point of view, April & Oliver can be seen as a kind of allegory. She represents his anima and he her animus. Oliver’s attraction to April has to do with his unconscious search for his unlived yin side, that intuitive, receptive and musical sensibility that he was connected to in his youth but largely cut off from in adulthood. Because she represents both his lost youth and his music, he projects onto her all that he has lost. For her part, Oliver represents her unlived yang side, the logic, assertiveness, and courage that would allow her to take control of her life. Naturally, they could never fulfill these roles for one another; they are flesh and blood human beings, not archetypes in a myth. However, through their honest interactions there is the possibility that they can nudge one another toward the kind of awareness that would allow them to start reclaiming the lost pieces of their souls.