Interview at Change Seven

I was interviewed at Change Seven by the amazing Curtis Smith today. We talked about my latest novel, The Summer She Was Under Water:

“I don’t make the characters do what I would do in facing these situations—as I’ve already illustrated, my characters seem to thwart me on every level—but I do wind up learning a lot about myself when writing about others. It reminds me of how psychologists say that children play as a way to learn to navigate social situations, that they’re sort of practicing for the real thing. And I guess, in a way, writers are people who have just never stopped playing.”

To read more, to here.

New Work in The Coffeelicious

Excited to have an excerpt of a novel I'm playing with in The Coffeelicious this week!


She clamped the lid tightly and pushed the button vreevreevree and the fruit was pink frothy soup, no pain, not like boiling a lobster, no anger at her for her betrayal. And if she did not drink it? Someone would come behind her — he would come behind, and put it in the refrigerator, thinking she would drink it later, or even pour it down the sink, if he’d ever had a thought to housekeeping, and no one would be any the wiser.

To read more, go here.

Tough Love

I've been playing a lot in my new novel not only with the idea of home, but in the way people communicate what they view to be their reality. Realities that are, in fact, illusions, and how they withhold words or information or coach words in a way to create ambiguity because they themselves are ambiguous or emotionally detached from themselves, their home. As Theo says in Donna Tartt's the Goldfinch:

How can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet—for me, anyway—all that’s worth living for lies in that charm?

In my life, I have always been a fixer, a saver, a codependent, a catcher in the rye. It is hard for me to understand people who will deny themselves the rawness, the richness, the realness, of feeling. For how can we know what's real until the air around us rents, until we are close to falling into the void? As a person, unfortunately I have always been drawn to such beautiful wreckage (and maybe that's my own pathology), but as a writer, it's hard for me to get into the heads of people who will hurt others so they themselves won't have to feel pain. Maybe by finding out how these storm systems break, I can free myself from their electrifying, dark energy.