What is something unique/quirky about you?
I
just started an Instagram where I write pastry reviews! Since I moved to
France, I’ve been trying to eat a different pastry every day. I figured, why
not share my passion for sweets with the world? (The insta is brioche_boy,
btw!)
What are some of your pet peeves?
When
people order the same thing as me at restaurants! First of all, I love to eat
alone. Sitting with someone else, having to make conversation with your mouth
full, having to wait for them to finish… it’s all too much. The only silver
lining is that I’ll have the chance to taste a dish other than mine. But if you
order the same things as me, it's ruined. Just go an eat by yourself!
What inspired you to write this book?
Spite. A Decade of Visions started as a
short story, which had all the same themes but with some minor changes: the
protagonist was a girl living with her father instead of a boy with his mother,
and the road trip in the second part of the story was about her and her
boyfriend absconding together after eloping. I was happy with the short story,
and didn’t touch it for a year. It wasn’t until I met a girl who had published
a novel that I felt the urge to write one myself, intending, I guess, to show
her up. I figured that DoV was
fertile enough to sprout a whole novel. So, yeah. I guess it was spite that
made me want to write it.
What can we expect from you in the future?
More books! I’m working on a piece right now that’s in
its early stages. Ideally I would like to link all these novels into a larger
cycle, but that’s an endeavor for another day.
Do you have any “side stories” about the characters?
Yes—Darren Deer, the lens of the second section, is
not instrumental to the plot, but you find out a lot more about him than is
normal for a secondary character. Have you ever find yourself thinking a lot
about someone you don’t like, trying to get into their head and understand why
they are the way they are? That’s how I feel about Darren. I go off on a whole
tangent because I wanted to understand the brain of someone who could do the things
Darren ends up doing. This was an awesome exercise in thinking outside of my
comfort zone—though I do think I may have spent a little too much time mulling
over him!
Where were you born/grew up at?
I
was born in Arlington, Virginia, a suburb of D.C. about which the less said the
better.
Who is your hero and why?
Cleopatra, for using her sexuality to fight for
something she cares about, and for eating a pearl.
What book do you think everyone should read?
The
Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. Not only is this queer
required reading, but it changed the way I think about my body and sexuality,
and how I approach happiness. It’s super short and very approachable— not to
mention the tightness and beauty of the prose. I cannot recommend it highly
enough!
Tell
us about a favorite character from a book.
I
haven’t seen many characters written with as much attention to the anxious
turnings of the mind as Elio from Call
Me By Your Name, which, if you haven’t read it, is absolutely queer required reading.
It was a visceral experience, and felt like nothing so much as going back to
high school and reliving those first earth-shattering feelings about another
boy… the magic of Call Me By Your
Name, though, is that instead of that first love being unrequited (a near
universal experience among LGBT youth), the author imagines a different future.
I’m tearing up just thinking about it.
Describe
your writing style.
Honestly?
It’s a mess. Since I am a recent graduate, my mind is still clacking around
with the million influences of four years’ worth of English readings. I try so
hard to emulate the glimmering, pool-clear writing of Woolf that I sometimes
fall into the deep end; other times I want nothing so much as to possess
William Carlos William’s gift of making an image with a mere suggestion of
words. The more I write, the more I realize I don’t have to try so hard to
sound like anything. I find
my most natural writing is speech: not dialogue per se, but the ups and downs
of one person’s voice, especially those who speak emphatically.
What
makes a good story?
Lasers,
and lots of them.
What are
you passionate about these days?
I’ve
been thinking a lot about gender presentation. This past year I’ve started
dressing more and more feminine. I’ve taken to wearing skirts in public, and my
hair is so long now that, from behind, I am often mistaken for a woman. And I
don’t know why it feels so good to dress feminine— but people always ask me why
I do it, I have a few set answers. The easiest one is that it feels good just
because. But as you may remember from your youth, “just because” is maybe the
worst thing you can say when someone asks you a question. I sometimes phrase it
in terms of subversion—that, as a boy, my wearing of a skirt is a political
statement. This is true to a degree, but if I kept the potential for subversion
in my mind at all times, I wouldn’t have the energy to even put on a skirt, let
alone parade around town. Really, the best answer I have is this: that wearing
a skirt makes me feel closer to my vision of my ideal myself, a vision that is
by no means clear. I hate to conclude by saying it is, at the end of the day,
more a question of intuition than anything else. But, as the French say, ça y est.
What do
you do to unwind and relax?
Reading,
of course! And sometimes, just lying on my back on the floor. It’s restful to
be a cadaver every once in a while!
What
made you want to become an author and do you feel it was the right decision?
I’m
not sure I am an author yet, really. I feel like the difference between an
author and a hobby writer is about how much of your life you’ve given over to
writing. As of yet, my concerns are to finish school and get my life set up.
All the writing done in the next few years is preparation for the years I will,
in fact, be an author. And whether or not it’s a the “right” decision will
depend on whether I can find a way to make a living off of it, or if I will
continue eating buttered noodles and water for the rest of my life.
What are they currently reading?
Les Mots by Jean-Paul
Sartre. It’s been strongly recommended to me a few times, and I feel obligated
to explore the French masters while I’m living here. I’m still trying to
understand why people read biographies—am I hoping some of his greatness is
imparted unto me? Am I trying to verify whether my tastes and life experience
are matching up with where his were, when he was my age?
How
long have you been writing?
My
first creative project was in middle school, but I don’t think I sat down with
the intention of writing a real story until college. It didn’t cross my mind to
try to publish anything for a few more years after that.
What
is your writing process? For instance do you do an outline first? Do you do the
chapters first?
For
me, the greatest thrill is arriving at the end of a paragraph, staring at the
page, and thinking: “What next?” This “what next” is what keeps me on my toes.
I’ve noticed that, when I know what I have planned for the characters, my
writing gets sloppy, since I know I’m writing towards something. It feels more like fill-in the blank. I let
chapters and sections flow organically.
Now
that I think about it, though, I feel like this lack of structure is what
causes the rushed feeling at the end of all my works, where I notice that the
plot hasn’t even started yet and it’s 200 pages in. Maybe I’ll give the
structured approach another shot!
Can you tell us a little bit about the characters in A Decade of Visions?
Certainly!
The protagonist is Roy, a boy living in the extremity of rural poverty during a
time in America when the earth itself seemed sick of us. Roy learns early on
that he can see the shades of things that have died. He also learns that he
does not feel about other boys the way other boys feel about other boys. Things
get dicey for Roy, and, in the section I omitted, circumstance effects a
transformation. In the second section, we learn that Roy has been living as a
woman, Raina. Antics ensue.
Woodrow
is the love interest, an African-American man with the shadow of racist
violence hanging over his head. He is on the lam for a crime he did not commit,
and joins Raina in her journey.
There’s
Inez, Roy’s mother, the paragon of the all-suffering mother.
Adrian
is the trigger for the plot, or at least his body is.
Do the characters all come to you at the same time or do some of them come to
you as you write?
I only
had a vision for Roy and Inez at the beginning—Woodrow didn’t appear until
later. I knew I needed someone to occupy the space of an Adrian trope, though I
didn’t prefigure how he would end up returning to the story toward the end.
What kind of research do you do before you begin writing a book?
Not
enough! Writing historical fiction is incredibly difficult because every object
the characters touch—to say nothing of landscapes and vocabulary—is suspect.
The writer must ask herself on a constant loop: “Did this exist in the 1940s?
Did this word mean then what it means today?” If I ever read historical fiction
again, I will take better care to make sure the concrete reality around the
characters is accurate. For anyone writing in a similar period: read Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It
contains literally hundreds of pages cataloging literally every object in the
houses of four impoverished sharecroppers in the 1930s. It is a treasure trove!
Describe
yourself in 5 words or less!
Wow!
Yikes! Oof. Too bad.
How
did you come up with the concept and characters for the book?
I
put more of myself in Roy than I knew at the time, and I think there was
something prescient in the way I had him transition genders—I am living through
a similar (though not exact) transformation today. The other characters are
re-workings of tropes that are readily available to any writer, save perhaps
Woodrow, a character who seems like an imperfect mirror of the tastes and
speech of Roy.
What
did you enjoy most about writing this book?
Definitely
describing The Pineapple. I am a huge advocate for the legalization of sex
work, and having the chance to imagine such a haven before the huge crack-downs
on female-owned bordellos in the 1930s that forced sex workers onto the street,
where male pimps started to take advantage of them in the way that continues
today. Imagining a place before puritanical laws robbed these women of their
dignity, not to mention their right to their own labor, was a treat. Not to
mention, I could describe opulent rooms for days!
Do
you have any advice to give aspiring writers?
Stephen
King once said everyone has one thousand pages of bad writing in them that need
to be gone through before quality can be achieved. Now that I’m closer to two
thousand, I wonder if he maybe meant ten thousand after all.
