Geographies is a collection of short stories featuring characters from varied backgrounds and areas of the world all dealing with loss, grief, and the consequences of their choices. What inspired you to write this anthology?

Well, it didn’t happen all at once. These stories were written over a long period of time – around ten to fifteen years. The inspiration for writing each one differed, and the experience of realizing each story was distinct. The only exceptions would be the two stories – “Geographies” and “Slipstream” – which are linked stories; but they were also written years apart. I would also say, during those years, my writing style was evolving and changing as well. It was a bumpy road with a lot of ups and downs along the way. Anyway, I just kept working, writing, and sending out stories. I always had in mind I’d publish a collection one day, but I didn’t really know what that would be like.

Finally, I began gathering my work together, both published and unpublished stories. As I did, I don’t know quite how to put it, but the stories began to speak to me. Again. Assembling them together, side by side, reawakened me to my characters and the ideas of grief and loss the stories contained. I realized there were subtle similarities many of the stories shared – metaphorical, thematic, and also with respect to characters. Things like images of maps, ideas in a couple of stories about displacement and the meaning of home, the ways in which memory is a map, and how it shapes our sense of time and the places in which they happen. I felt as if I’d made a kind of tapestry, over time. It surprised me. I hadn’t expected that. You just never know how things like this will go until you’re doing it.

Are there any emotions or memories from your own life that you put into your characters’ lives?

Yes and no. I sometimes think of my stories as little Jungian puzzles. You can’t avoid running into your own psychic wellsprings when writing. I view fiction as an encounter with both truth and imagination. For me, the making of fiction always involves shaping a story through what I think of as a kind of ephemeral, half-lit inner theater of memory and emotion which is then synthesized and animated by imagination – or what I might call psychic imagination. I think there’s a liminal space of waiting and listening that exists between the writer and her characters, once the story is set in motion. It involves a complex interplay of so many things.

In “High Grass” for instance, I drew on a lot of my own childhood memories from our family’s years in West Texas – hazy and elusive memories that served as a kind of portal into the world of that story. But what happens in the story is purely fiction. Once I found my way in, I allowed my imagination to realize the story. On the other hand, in stories like “The White Cliffs Hotel” and “A Bowl Full of Oranges,” it took much more in the way of what I guess I’d call imaginative emotional empathy, especially with respect to my characters – both elderly men. I came to them by starting with places I knew – the old hotel in Dover, England and that little apartment in New York. From there, I stayed with them, as if I were keeping company with them. Slowly, like the peeling of an onion, they revealed themselves to me. Was that my memory and my emotions at work? Perhaps. I think as I wrote these stories, I was responding as much to the place as I was to the character being in that place.

Do you have a favorite among the short stories in your collection or a character that you especially loved writing for?

Oh, gosh, that’s a tough one. I guess of the stories “The List” is one of my favorites. There is much about it that came together so quickly, which was unusual for me. I’m a slow writer. Anyway, I wrote it in a matter of days, and while I did some revising and tinkering here and there, it is largely as I first wrote it. I think it was the voice. I just liked it. As for a character, I think I would say it is the boy, Louis, from “Some Kind of Day.” I loved him. He’s a scrappy, mischievous, and happily oblivious kid, a bit of a schemer who also senses things about the grownup world he doesn’t fully understand and can’t really articulate – that grownups lie and are hypocrites; the fear he hears in his grandmother’s voice; his mother’s anxieties and simmering anger, and the shadow the death of his father has cast over the entire family.

What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?

It’s one story at a time for me. I don’t know what the next book will be. I’ll just keep working and see what happens.

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