Year of the Puffin follows a college football team from Iceland who sets their sights on winning a championship in the American College Football League. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

American culture has influenced many aspects of Icelandic society, so I thought it would be interesting to take a quintessentially American phenomenon—college football—and drop it into this small island nation. I also thought it could be productively counterintuitive to make the head coach of the team a woman since American football has a reputation for being a hypermasculine sport. Beyond that, I began writing with nothing more than a basic conflict in mind. I imagined the head coach as a character who would be committed to the success of the football program in a very purist sense—she would be someone who is devoted to the ideal of winning for the sake of winning, and her notions of football (with its emphasis on camaraderie, teamwork, sacrifice, leadership, etc.) would be quite idealistic. And then, I imagined a male athletic director who would also be committed to the success of the program, but he would have a more instrumental view of the team. He would be someone who wants to win so he can push a larger agenda. That was basically what I had when I typed the opening lines: a football program in Iceland, and two characters, one man and one woman, who are devoted to the same cause, but for oppositional reasons.

There was a lot of time spent crafting the character traits in this novel. What was the most important factor for you to get right in your characters?

I suppose the most important factor was psychological realism. I knew the characters were all going to be quirky oddballs in their own way, but I didn’t want their intentions to feel random. I wanted some kind of explanation for why they felt the way that they did. I wanted their actions to feel motivated. For me, one of the keys was to provide each of them with a history, but I leaned toward revealing their backstories in impressions and snippets at select moments.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

I think the primary theme in the novel centers on illusions—in particular, the illusions that we build up about people and places. Three of the main characters assemble their mental lives around a muse-type person, an individual who inspires them and/or brings structure and purpose to their goals. However, in each case, the character does not actually know this other person well. Drawing on memories, pictures, and fantasies, they poach select facets of another person’s identity to fit their own romantic vision. They assemble imaginative constructs of the people they love, but they also grasp on some level that such constructs are founded on separation. They benefit from designing their lives around a person they can love from a distance, without the full weight of responsibility and commitment. For me, part of what is interesting about this dynamic is the way that the emotions and actions that arise in these situations can be entirely genuine, even if the individual is ultimately (and, in some cases, disastrously) mistaken about the other person. I wanted this theme to extend to the representation of Iceland, a country that is depicted in tourist narratives and foreign media as a uniquely tolerant, open-minded, and peaceful nation filled with natural splendor. This impression is not wholly false, but the fantasy construct of the nation tends to trump the reality of its culture and climate. In the novel, “Year of the Puffin” refers to the title of a sports feature that captures this kind of idealized portrait of Iceland. In a sense, the novel as a whole is intended to be a more realistic counterpoint to such a portrait.

What is the next book that you are writing, and when will that be published?

At present, I am working on a novel about virtual reality and computer games that features four different first-person narrators. I am not sure when it will be published, but I hope to complete a first draft within a year.

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