What is your latest book about?
It’s called Photocopies of Heaven. It’s about how miracles are all around us but we don’t always notice them, about how the tiniest of everyday things is amazing, about how technology shapes our lives and the stories we tell about them, about how nothing means anything, and everything means something.
How many stories are in the collection?
Twenty-eight, though one is in six episodes.
What unites them?
I think they’re all about characters looking for meaning in their lives; about people who feel moments of intense spirituality but don’t have religion and don’t know what to do with those feelings, or about people who don’t feel any spirituality, but are surprised when they do (or feel something they have no better word for than ‘spirituality’ but it doesn’t fit with the way they view the world), or would be surprised if they could ever see the world more clearly. They’re stories about everyday miracles, the most amazing things that we take for granted, and, mostly, about people who are alive now and have the same kind of references to pop culture and contemporary technology as I do. In addition to that a number of the stories also share characters, sometimes re-appearing in minor roles, so you get this sense that people move on and they’re not just trapped in the character arc of one simple story. It’s quite exciting, because it means there’s a way of giving longer and richer character arcs to characters in short stories - and I think this is something I’d like to have another look at in the future.
How did the idea behind the book come about?
I wanted to write about the kinds of people I mix with and meet in my life; people who don’t have lives like action movie plotlines, people who are scrabbling around, trying to make sense of their lives, and, for the most part, just trying to do the best they can. I’m interested in what these people think about, and how they live - that’s really exciting to me. So much of our lives are shaped around popular culture and technology it seemed important to address that - it seems that’s where we do a lot of our living. I also wanted to explore it without resorting to the laziness of cynicism. I wanted to find ways of writing about how amazing life can be sometimes and how people have feelings that are almost spiritual even if they aren’t religious - and I wanted to do this without being dogmatic or facile.
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