SmokeLong Quarterly

Laid Hunt will give a copy of his book In the House in the Dark of the Woods to the writer of the story he selects for publication (U.S. address only)!

You were born in Singapore, and I currently live in Singapore, so I have to ask you about it! You grew up in many different places — from The Hague to Indiana (which is where I call home now, although I didn’t grow  up there). Do you think living in such different parts of the world has shaped your writing? Your world view? In what ways? Where is home to you? 

I love that we have these things in common! Since the start I’ve followed parallel vectors as a writer – in one of them I’ve written about cities, often with an international inflection, and in the other my concerns have been rural, historical, concerned with nature.  This has to do with the upbringing you allude to above. Even when I lived in rural Indiana with my grandmother as a boy, I spent summers in Hong Kong or Taiwan with my father. I always had the suspicion that one of these inclinations would gain the upper hand but even as, in recent years, I’ve focused more in my published work on novels set in the past and in the country, I’ve been writing a long series of autobiographical stories and essays that take up my experiences in different countries. So that if I now call hilly, watery Providence, RI, home, the Indiana flatlands continue to haunt my imagination, as do the winding streets of central London, the boulevards of Paris, and the skyscrapers of New York, two of which, one now distant day in September, I was close enough to (the Lower East Side) to see come down.

You have a new novel coming out in 2021. What can you tell us about it?

Zorrie borrows the structure of Gustave Flaubert’s A Simple Heart to recount the life of an Indiana farm woman. Running from 1910 to approximately 1980, it encompasses about as much love and loss as a mortal body can bear.

Who are some your favorite writers to teach?

I come back over and over again to Percival Everett (especially Erasure), Lydia Davis, Nicholson Baker (esp. The Mezzanine), Michael Ondaatje’s early prose workings, Karen Tei Yamashita’s hybrids of fiction and essay, Anne Carson’s novel-in-verse Autobiography of Red and the weird, haunting, hypnotic Marie Redonnet tryptich in Jordan Stump’s excellent translation.

What kind of story would you love to find in your queue this week?

I keep hoping that, one day, I’ll turn a corner on one of my every day walks and find myself in another country, maybe even another world.  I’m always looking to read work (and this has nothing to do with what genre it is written in or what approach has been taken) that makes me feel, even just for a second, that this has already happened.