LA: Ah, that explains the origin of Winkler’s work in the story. You must have been quite taken with Bentley’s book, and it’s easy to see why. I know the appeal of patterning; my husband paints this way, playing with the idea of chance operations. ‘Who would study something so ordinary and troublesome as snow?’ you ask. That’s the kind of question that one answers by writing a novel! Yes, much of this is subconscious. I recently began writing about vegetarianism only to discover my real subject was meat—in all its connotations. Lately I’ve been taken with the word’s homonyms: meet, mete. Did you find as you wrote About Grace that you altered your original plan in the course of writing? How did the seed idea presented by Bentley’s snowflake plates grow as you wrote?
AD: Yes, yes, everything changes. Subjects morph; settings prove unreliable; first person becomes third; present tense needs to become past tense. About Grace started as long stretches of short story about a weatherman who is losing his sight and takes a prostitute down to Mexico and accidentally drowns her. I had to keep hammering away at the sections for several years; adding a mother for Sandy, taking her away, shuffling settings, introducing Naima, etc., and none of these things were part of my original plan for the novel. Probably the only constants through all the false starts and half-done drafts were that I wanted Winkler to wear thick glasses and own a copy of Bentley’s book as a boy.
Writing narrative is almost entirely trial and error for me, and the status of whatever I’m working on changes from day to day. I can envision what I think might be a skeleton for the story, but by the time I’m lumping flesh onto, say, the leg, both the arms have changed. Endings are rarely what I think they will be; middles often become beginnings. Sometimes someone I thought would be a minor character actually becomes the protagonist: This happened in a short story I wrote called “For a Long Time This Was Griselda’s Story.”
It’s not the most efficient way to work: I usually generate at least 100 pages of prose for a 20-page short story. I probably have a couple thousand pages of prose that I wrote for About Grace. But I wouldn’t want it any other way: It is the surprise, the joy of inventiveness, that keeps me coming back to the desk. I write because I never quite know what the finished product will be, because I never quite know how I feel about something until I start laying out sentences. In that sense, writing is a kind of thinking, really.
LA: Your stories are often set in unconventional locales — the Alaskan tundra; Lamu, Kenya and Liberia, West Africa; rural Montana and Idaho; Lithuania; an island in the Caribbean — not what one might expect from an Ohioan. One of your characters moves from Ohio to the East Coast to become a shipbuilder, a romantic venture that cannot be supported. Many of your characters move from one place to another that is very much unlike the first. What are your characters seeking, and what do they find? Why this emphasis on the journey, the extremes in setting?
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