My favorite story writers are Andre Dubus and Alice Munro. His recent depictions of AIDS are heartbreaking meditations, but necessary. My favorite novelist is Andrew Holleran who wrote the funny, yet moving, Dancer from the Dance, one of the first novels to depict gays living in a gay world, not gays existing in a straight one. I have a lot of favorite writers, most for different reasons. Who is your favorite author (fiction writer or poet), and what draws you to their work? In “Billiards” Ian sees his mother being struck and does nothing, which is a place he was not in at the beginning of the story. I can tell when a story is finished when a character has no other direction to turn. It usually takes a year for me to fully complete a story. How can you tell when a piece of writing is finished? I don’t really believe in writer’s block, and think that any stalled momentum can be cured simply by reading writers you admire. The best ideas, for me, are usually when I think up a character and then ask myself, in what place or scenario can I put them to cause them the most grief? Writer’s block doesn’t usually last more than a few minutes when it hits me, I just pick up a book, an Alice Munro or Richard Ford, or whatever, and read a story, and then the flow returns to me. I usually play around with my characters in my head for a couple of weeks before I write a single word. I write at a desk with music, anything from folk to rock nearby are my hundreds of books. My ideal writing time is during the day, usually from eleven onward. The whirlpools you heard about as a child, the ones in the nearby abandoned town where everyone died of disease.ĭiscuss your writing process - inspirations, ideal environments, how you deal with writer’s block. A broken-down car that has been in the neighbor’s yard for years, and the stray cats that crawl in and out of the broken windows. A trailer missing underpinning, revealing the bricks that keep it off the ground. This can be both good and bad, depending on the place. Usually a place sticks in my head when it has a sense of amazement to it. How do your experiences or memories of specific places-such as where you grew up, or a place you’ve visited that you can’t get out of your head-play a role in your writing? If the Clutter family had been brutally murdered in New York City, I doubt In Cold Blood would have been written when these acts of violence, or ones of beauty, occur in the Midwest, the quietness is disrupted and people take notice. Whether writing a story about a first breakup, or one filled with magic, the Midwest allows for these stories to come about in a natural, yet surprising way. There is a sort of quietness to the Midwest, a calmness, even, that lets story emerge in a very nuanced way. What do you think is the most compelling aspect of the Midwest? I would say that this struggle with environment is a theme often explored in my stories. I took many workshops, attended readings, wrote my first stories that, while amateurish, contained all the elements of storytelling. At IU I worked with a great group of fiction writers who taught me about craft and which writers I should be reading. It took finding this oasis in the middle of Indiana to fully understand and accept who I am without this discovery, I think every word I would have written would have been dishonest and narrow. Yet, while this upbringing and town often play a role in my fiction, it wasn’t until I left the place to attend college at Indiana University-Bloomington that I began my journey as a writer. My childhood was lived in a tiny trailer with a refrigerator filled with food purchased using food stamps. I was raised in a southern Indiana town called Loogootee (depicted in “Billiards”), which literally has about three stoplights. What’s your connection to the Midwest, and how has the region influenced your writing? Justin Carmickle’s story “Billiards” appears in Midwestern Gothic Issue 18, out now.
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