Q&A with 2012 Featured Author Siobhan Fallon

Siobhan Fallon’s debut collection of stories, “You Know When the Men Are Gone,” was listed as a Best Book of 2011 by The San Francisco Chronicle and Janet Maslin of The New York Times; has been called “the explosive sort of literary triumph that appears only every few years” by New York Journal of Books; “a terrific and terrifically illuminating book” by The Washington Post and a “searing collection” by Entertainment Weekly. Her stories and essays have appeared in Women’s Day, Good Housekeeping, New Letters, Publishers Weekly, among others.

Where do you find inspiration?
Everywhere. I especially like new places and then trying to filter the experience through an outsider’s perspective. That was part of what was so exciting for me while writing “You Know When the Men Are Gone.” As a military spouse, I was writing what I knew, but sometimes I would step outside of myself and think about how crazy that life must seem to people on the other side of the front gate: the constant deployments, the thousand men who pack their bags, kiss their wives and babies, and head off for an entire year into a war zone. Or how the retreat plays at five o’clock, and all the cars in Fort Hood suddenly stop driving, soldiers and spouses get out, face the flag in the distance, salute or put their hands on their hearts until the bugle song is over. Now I am writing about life abroad, about Americans living in Amman, Jordan, where there is a little bit of a similar disconnect, the expats exist in two different worlds, trying to balance very different world views. There is so much material there.

What advice do you have for aspiring authors?
I remember how much consolation I would get from stories about successful writers who had a difficult time getting published (think Madeline L’Engle, whose “A Wrinkle in Time” was rejected by more than two dozen publishers, or J.K Rowling and her first Harry Potter, rejected by twelve publishers). So, writers out there, don’t get discouraged, or perhaps just get discouraged enough to do a kick-butt rewrite. Every revision will make your work stronger, every new story or book is tighter and better than the last. Stay at it; work so hard you dream about your characters. It will eventually pay off.

What are you reading right now?
“The Postmistress” by Sarah Blake. The voice is perfect; it creates such a vivid portrait of the 1930’s, and shows the reader a rare glimpse into World War II: how small-town America waited to be pulled into the fight and how ordinary people in London managed day to day life during the Blitz.

I also just finished Kayt Sukel’s “Dirty Minds.” I don’t usually pick up non-fiction, and I certainly never pick up science writing. But Kayt’s book was an incredible eye-opener about how love and lust affect the human brain, about everything from how a monogamous (and cute) prairie vole will kill another male vole trying to seduce its ‘wife,’ to the similar activation of brain areas by sexual obsession and drug addiction.

Oh, and I just started reading local writer, Glen Finland’s “Next Stop”—her memoir about raising her differently abled son into an independent adulthood. It’s a gorgeous book, beautifully written, incredibly funny at times, always introspective and smart. It will make you appreciate family in a new way and give your child an extra kiss at bedtime.

What’s your favorite opening line from a book?
“I will be her witness” from Joan Didion’s “The Book of Common Prayer.” It immediately makes me, the reader, skeptical about the trustworthiness and motivations of the narrator. The reader is never sure if the narrator is telling the life of the protagonist, Charlotte, or her own life filtered through the events in Charlotte’s life. And I love that kind of unreliable narrator who offers the reader a great story as well as a great puzzle to figure out.

If you could sit down at dinner with three other authors, living or dead, which three authors would you choose, and why?
Shakespeare. Lorrie Moore. Flannery O’Connor.

Shakespeare because he changed the way the western world looked at literature, and continues to change it and inform writers, playwrights, and Hollywood directors. Who else in the history of literature has created a body of work that continues to live in this way? To stay fresh and timely? Who can write something that speaks to YA readers like Romeo and Juliet and also tackle old age and familial disintegration like King Lear?

Lorrie Moore because her narrators are the funniest, most broken-hearted human beings in the entire world. She would have us laughing and crying at the turn of a fork, and surely Shakespeare would be inspired to write an entire new play and series of sonnets about her.

Flannery O’Connor, because she is an extraordinary writer, but also because she lived a hermetic life, died too young, and definitely needs resurrecting. I think she and Lorrie Moore would really hit it off. O’Connor tragedies have a touch of Shakespeare in them too, such grief, such dark humor. And me, well, I would just set the table, make and serve the food, keep their wine glasses full to the brim, and listen in awe to their brilliance.