Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What genre is your fiction?
A: I used to tell people I write literary fiction, which is basically anything that doesn't fit into any other genre. People were never satisfied with that answer. But when my short story collection was published, it was classified by the publishers as absurdist. That surprised me at first because I didn't see my work that way. But I guess I look at the world through what might be considered an absurd lens, and since I've always seen the world that way it seems normal to me. You might find my work absurd, but to me it's total realism.
Q: Where does your inspiration come from?
A: Mostly from music, and mostly classical music. To me, creative writing is a form of musical composition. Themes are introduced, developed, repeated, expanded. It incorporates rhythm, tempo, dynamics, even pitch. My ideas come mostly from my own life, the lives of others, things I read about in nonfiction books and articles, sometimes directly from music. I get a lot of my ideas while driving or on my rowing machine. You'll see that vehicles figure in a number of my stories; I have yet to come up with a premise that involves a rowing machine, but it's only a matter of time.
Q: So who are your favorite composers?
A: In no particular order, Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Mahler, Shostakovich. But when working on a story I sometimes take a deep dive into a specific composer, genre, or period; one of my recent stories is entirely informed by Renaissance polyphony.
Q: And your favorite authors?
As a preschooler my mother had me read Dr. Suess aloud as she washed the dinner dishes (my first brush with absurdism?). In elementary school I was all about Poe. In middle school I devoured nearly all of Shakespeare's plays. In high school it was George Bernard Shaw. Since then I mostly read nonfiction, but I do sometimes go on a whodunit jag, most recently Elizabeth George. I like Thomas Mann a lot, and Ann Patchett. (If you think that's a weird combination, read The Magic Mountain and Bel Canto back to back.) I think Thornton Wilder's novels are underrated. Virginia Woolf is the best of the moderns, bar none. Nowadays I spend a fair amount of time reading my friends' fiction and poetry.
Q: Why don't you write plays anymore?
A: I had an encouraging streak of productions in the eighties and nineties, and audiences enjoyed them, but they received little post-production attention, and then the Theater lost interest in me, which--and this may be be pure egotism--led me to question the Theater's taste. Plus theater is a highly collaborative art form and the network of my youth is no longer a network. But two of my three best plays are unproduced if anyone's interested. :-)