And I loved Jeffery Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, but it was the film adaptation that really got me. More specifically, I wouldn’t be the writer I am today without Janet Fitch’s White Oleander or Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. I read anything I could get my hands on growing up, and sometimes those might have been age-inappropriate texts, but all of it shaped me. I’ve wanted to write a book since very young. What cultural resources influenced you as a writer? It takes whatever a writer’s obsessing over and turns it on its face so it can be viewed from many angles. At first, I thought, oh no, you keep writing the same thing over and over… without realizing that’s exactly what a story collection does. I had written a handful of these stories before I realized they might be a collection. Were they written gradually came together later, or did you always conceive of them as a growing collection?Ī version of the oldest story in the book was written in 2012 in one of my undergraduate workshops, and the rest sometime between 20. I hope this collection offers something to readers who would not ordinarily describe themselves as “lovers of the short form.” Most of these stories have been published individually in literary journals. And there’s all this room for me to imagine how their lives might continue off the page. I think it’s amazing that in such a brief space, I can fall so deeply into the lives of characters that they become realized. More often than not, it’s like I’m uncovering a story than creating it outright.

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