Field Report on The Next Big Thing

Thank you Steven Karl and Christopher Kondrich for tagging me for The NEXT BIG THING. Here's the interview with myself.

What is the working title of the book?
Wolf and Pilot

Where did the idea come from for the book?
My first book had more personal subject matter, centered around the tragedy of my sister's death. I wanted to really break away from that, start fresh, so I invented a sort of fairy tale-ish world. Think Sleeping Beauty meets Twin Peaks.

What genre does your book fall under?
Poetry

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
My new beautiful son could play all the parts because he's a genius.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
Four girls run away from their mother, who is a witch, and find shelter with the teacher and detective who have sex together while becoming the chosen parents of the girls.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
Are you kidding? Three years at least. With a great group of friends, I workshopped the first draft and finalized the manuscript at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Four Way Books, my publisher, granted me the opportunity to spend time there.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
Well, as I mentioned earlier, I really wanted to do something different and several books and films were setting up the new project. I watched Picnic at Hanging Rock shortly after reading Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. So I was interested in exploring the spooky nature of spookiness--girls who communicate without speaking, torture, bad things that happen to good people for example.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
Wolf and Pilot consists of poems that tell a sort of story. The poems also embody the voices of the four girls, the witch mother, the teacher, and the detective. The usual dynamic of a fairy tale is that the children lose their idyllic, perfect mother and have to escape the hatred and jealousy of their step-mother. I was interested in thwarting that dynamic by having the four girls escape their evil mother and find a new set of parents. 

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
My book is published by Four Way Books, who also published my first book Rising. You can purchase both books here.

Watch my book trailer here. 

I'm tagging Christie Ann Reynolds, Maureen Alsop, Lily Ladewig, and Tara Betts.