Without explaining why and without naming other authors or books, can you discuss the various influences on your book?
WATKINS: The California Water Wars, Manzanar (the Japanese-American internment camp in the Owens Valley), Chinatown, wanting to write a plotty novel where the main character was a sand dune, nuclear-waste storage facilities at Yucca Mountain and Onkalo.
KLEEMAN: I was influenced by everything—books, television, shopping malls, parking lots, ad banners on websites. I empathize with amphibians—my skin is extremely permeable to the outside world.
SALESSES: Prague, people I met in Prague, Korea, adoption, ruins, family, fatherhood. Once as a kid I saw a blue glow near my bed. I walked with my back against the wall whenever I was home alone.
PHILLIPS: Sitting at a desk in a windowless office doing data entry. A two-month period when my husband and I had to move from sublet to sublet. The Forer effect. Waiting on the subway platform on the first cold day of fall when all your warm clothing is in storage. Watching old men fish in the dirty lake in Prospect Park. No longer having 20/20 vision. Population statistics.
TOLTZ: Hospital waiting rooms. Internet comment boards. TV news cycles. Boredom. People I know. People I don’t know. People I can’t believe exist. People I eavesdrop on.
GROFF: Some nights, at dinner, I think so hard about what I’m working on I don’t notice my husband or kids or the fact that I’m eating.
Once, while having drinks with my best female friends, I looked around and thought, “Oh my god, they’re all so full of rage.”
The sound of strings tuning up before an opera starts always makes me cry.
The happiest moments of my life are happy only in retrospect; in the moment, I am always wretchedly uncomfortable.
I wake up in the middle of the night and look over at my sleeping husband’s back and feel an existential desolation because I do not know who this man is, will never know, really, who he is, he is a stranger, we do not know each other. The feeling presses down on me physically, like a very heavy rock, but vanishes by morning.
‘The happiest moments of my life are happy only in retrospect; in the moment, I am always wretchedly uncomfortable.‘ - Lauren Groff
from Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/128766456562