SmokeLong Quarterly

One of my favorite stories from your collection Sweet, Sweet Sipping is “Every Scone Buttered, Every Cup Cleaned.” The way you build tension through repeating customers’ orders, the sounds of a busy café, the smell of a burnt scone, made the ending brutality feel inevitable. What advice would you give a writer struggling to build tension in her stories?

Think about how you make a good cup of tea. You don’t put your water in the microwave. The heat is artificial and often un-even there. You put it on the stove in a nice kettle. Preferably red. You don’t let it over boil. Overboiled water is unmitigated destruction.  You let the water warm to the edge of boiling. You pour the water. Then you let things transform in the cup when you add the leaves. You watch all your effort seep into the water, you see the chemical elements of life take hold. The end of the story is what happens in that cup. It takes all the disparate elements and makes something wonderful.

What routine do you have to do to write?

I drink tea. Tea is a great power in my life, I have observed its effects on an epic scale. Tea roasts your insides. Many people claim tea inspires them, but as everybody knows, tea only makes boring people more boring. Think about it, even though most stores are now open twenty-four hours, even though most cafes are open until midnight now, all-night if you live in a great city, writers are still writing the same old Carver-inflected writing. I blame coffee and liquor for that.

You’ve spoken often against trends you see in contemporary writing today. How do you think writers can, as you’ve put it, “rediscover their individuality”?

I make a point of operating at different times than other people. I go to bed every day at 7 PM and wake at 1 AM. Then I write and write and write. I am like a chicken scratching seeds out of the dust when I write. Focused. I only stop writing to drink another cup of tea. I think having a different schedule than the majority of the world makes me see it a little more clearly.

I have also found that chewing tea leaves whole or sucking the black fibers straight from a cut open tea packet, no water, on an empty stomach will also have a profound effect on the brain.  It will make memory bloom and twist off into different gardens filled with glorious blooms and pernicious ants and beetles. It will punch the writer’s stomach and pull on his tongue. It will give a clarifying pain that forces the new. If one does this, he will be sure to have at least one original insight about life.