Loving the Process: An Interview with Amy Gustine
“[A]nd then I see it—the destination. It always rises up out of the dust, closer than I thought it was, and usually as a little bit of a surprise.”
“[A]nd then I see it—the destination. It always rises up out of the dust, closer than I thought it was, and usually as a little bit of a surprise.”
“Horses have an uncanny ability to tap into your feelings, your vulnerabilities, and your strengths.”
“The Farallon Islands are an extreme environment. I think that in that kind of environment, we are all stripped down to our essentials.”
“Maybe all the books I read in childhood about faraway places helped to shape that part of my imaginative engine; I don’t know.”
Chance Solem-Pfeifer talks to Justin Taylor about living in the Pacific Northwest, writing in the second-person, seeing Phish live, and playing pinball.
On the personal origins of her novel, Thicker Than Blood: “[It] started with the idea of that letter and why someone would keep a letter that no one would be allowed to read.”
“It’s short, but once I hit on it, this little observation seemed to encapsulate everything I’d written before or since: ‘In my writing, I wrestle with questions of gender, power, identity, complicity, and harm. Even so, I still find the world beautiful.'”
“I think influence is everywhere, right? We are influenced by places, people, what we overhear, what we see, what we do and what is done to us, various states of being.”
“Eventually, I made peace with the artifice: all of it is manipulated, all of it designed to form a cohesive whole. And then I really began to figure out potential connections between characters and events.”
“I believe that if you’re looking closely at the world, it’s funny. Even the horrible things are funny in some way. And if you’re looking closely enough, everything’s also pretty sad. So I see it as my job not to shy away from either of those, and to let them coexist.”
