BYU English Reading Series: I make a little speech, give a reading, and answer some excellent questions

“Stories are like dreams in that they draw on the dark, inchoate material of the subconscious in order to give expression to our fears, desires, and anxieties.  But unlike a dream, a story is crafted to have some sort of structure and order and coherence and meaning.  So for me, these stories are meant to be dream realities in which it’s difficult for the characters—and I hope, for the readers, too—to discern the distinctions between fantasy and reality.  It can be very difficult for these characters to know what to believe and what to disbelieve.”

Inscape Journal interview with Hannah Peterson

“Fables operate like dreams. In a fable or a dream, you never know quite what’s going to happen. You don’t know quite what the rules are. The fantastical can invade the realistic at any time. When we dream, we’re trying to impose some sort of meaning on the apparent chaos of our existence. We dream to reprocess what’s happened to better understand it. But dreams are also chaotic and confusing. I don’t know if you’ve thought about your own dreams lately, but a lot of times, I have no idea what mine mean. They seem like nonsense. Fables are trying to capture that sense of a dream world where anything can happen—the fabulous may be just around the corner. And yet, unlike a dream, the fable is fashioned in a more purposeful way. A fable is like a more coherent dream.”

One Story interview

“I … try to show how some individuals will invariably resist collective customs and beliefs—for various reasons. Some, like Osa in “The Great Fish,” have radical imaginations—they have their own visions that contradict the beliefs of the group. While I intend these stories to celebrate such visionaries—their heroic and fanatical independence—I also want to explore how the boldness required to break with prevailing opinion can itself be dangerous and lead to risky choices inspired by visions with a possibly dubious relation to the truth.”

Conversation with Joseph Bathanti and Joanne Pearson: Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill

“When the setting is being told, it’s from that character’s point of view—these are the things that this character would notice.  These are the things that this character would love and care about. … Setting is always filtered through some sort of consciousness.  So when you’re talking about setting, what you’re really doing, in part, is revealing what the characters care about, and what the characters see, what the characters experience.  …. You’re talking about setting so that you can better understand who the people are who inhabit this place.”

Interview with Yale News

“We all have to tell ourselves stories, comforting stories, to get through life. I want readers to ask themselves, ‘What comforting stories, or what fables, or what myths do I tell myself or do I myself believe? And of those stories that I tell myself, how much of that is a fantasy? How much of that is harmless? And how much of that is essential?’”

Interview with A2Pulp

“The short story is the perfect container for the imagination. The form invites creative play but within limits. With a novel, your imagination is given free rein to keep creating new characters, situations, backstories, and conflicts, and that can be fun until you make it about two hundred pages in, when you have to start trying to steer that chaos of scenarios toward some form of resolution. That’s what I mean by the limits of the story—the fact that you have only about 10,000 words forces you to focus on a tight set of characters and circumstances. Sure, when I’m drafting a story, I take wrong turns every now and then, but it’s easier with a story than with a novel to figure out where you went astray.”