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Your novella “What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?” opens as a boy is floating on his back in a pond. We gradually come to learn that he’s part of a wealthy extended family gathering for the summer at the family’s estate in New Hampshire. When did this character, Chip, first come to you?
Photograph by Eli Sinkus
My parents live on an old farm in New Hampshire, all apple trees and ponds and turkeys in the fields, though it’s a far humbler version of the estate in the story. A few years ago, my family renovated my parents’ little barn into a house so that we can stay for the summer to escape Florida’s heat. We spend a lot of the day floating in the pond, which is so brown with tannins and rich with newts that it’s a little disconcerting; I always feel afraid I’m going to hurt a newt or two when I dive in. The pond is spring-fed, so always cold, but sometimes the July sun will heat the pond to bathwater-warm for the top foot, and, if you float lon
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In your story “Old Babes in the Wood,” two elderly sisters spend time at a family cottage by a lake a place they’ve been visiting since their father built it when they were children. Did you have a particular cottage in mind while writing this?
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Yes, it’s a real place, or places. I’ve spent a lot of time in various locations in the northern boreal forest, and, like the cabin in the story, they all had sand and hand pumps. These were not originally summer cottages, however. My family lived in the boreal forest for two-thirds of every year, from before ice breakup until snowfall and freeze-up. My father was, at that time, a field biologist, and these places were isolated and did not have electricity. The structures themselves were built with hand tools.
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Your story in this week’s issue of the magazine, “Separation,” centers on Kate, a young woman whom we follow through a run of life changes. The story’s fairly short, but you touch down at various significant moments in Kate’s life. What are the challenges and rewards from taking in such a long scope of time in a short story?
Photograph by Edward Friedman
I started writing this story during a period of my life that seemed to me to lack narrative coherence: no defining features, no unifying theme, characters who came and went with alarming finality. And yet I was familiar enough with the way people tend to narrativize their lives that I assumed from some future point in time I would find this “phase” all too easy to sum up: oh, yeah,