Q&A

How do you get the ideas for your stories?

From landscape, a lot of the time, or an occupation that piques my curiosity. While visiting Bodie State Park—a ghost town in the Eastern Sierra—I imagined what it might be like to work there as a ranger, to stay after all the tourists had gone home. A year later, I met an archeologist and found myself asking him about his work investigating former Native American chipping sites. From that, the character of Holly and the story “Away from Trees” was born. Having the details of the landscape and of her job gave me a way in.

My uncle's L.A. backyard inspired the title story, "The View from Below"

Why is landscape so important to your work?

For one thing, it lets me see the story as I’m writing. What’s in my mind’s eye often has a stronger pull than what’s right in front of me, in the kind of haunting way that can lead to fiction. When I lived in New York City, the California landscape kept creeping into my work. Then, when I returned to California, I starting writing about Manhattan and the smells of the subway. As a child, I fantasized about snowy New England villages, yet the whole time I was absorbing California’s dry hills, her oak trees, her relentless sunshine. Eventually, it all finds its way in.

A lot of these stories deal with loss. How much of this book was written in response to your brother’s death?

None of the stories in The View From Below is about my brother’s death as it happened. The story that is the closest to fact is “Like This,” based on something he’d told me about following a woman he thought was me on the street. It wasn’t me – I was in New York at the time. After he died I couldn’t get the episode out of my mind. I had to turn it into a story.

How did The View from Below come to be published?

It won a contest. I’d been sending out individual stories, and in 1996, “Away from Trees” (the story about the archeologist who goes to Bodie) won the Writers@Work Fiction Fellowship. Then, in 1997, the whole collection won the Mid-List Press First Series Award. Part of the prize was publication.