Dear Reader,
I’ve been revisiting some childhood classics these past couple months, including the video game that turned me into a writer, Final Fantasy VII, and it’s gotten me thinking a lot about formative inspirations. I mean the kinds of influences that don’t leave a mark on just one project but on every single thing you create, whether through the tropes you’re drawn to or the themes you explore or the styles you evoke. The word lineage comes to mind here—family trees of inspiration—and I thought I’d share some of mine with you today.
I first read Watership Down by Richard Adams sometime near the end of elementary school/beginning of middle school, and now I reread it almost every year. At its core, it’s the story of a group of wandering rabbits searching for a new home, and in it you can find so many elements that come up again and again in my own work: found family, unlikely heroes, stories-within-stories (here’s looking at you, Reader Trilogy), intensely detailed descriptions of the landscape. There are even footnotes for the fictional rabbit-language, which totally influenced the language footnotes in A Thousand Steps into Night! If you can find it, the audiobook narrated by Ralph Cosham is truly excellent, but it’s such a cozy story, I recommend reading it at a cabin or out on a picnic or anywhere you’ve got a good calming view of nature.
In my first upper division creative writing course at UC Santa Cruz, my instructor, Karen Yamashita, assigned us If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino, a novel in which a reader is in search of the book, If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino. Chapters alternate between the first chapters of multiple (unfinished) fictional books titled If on a winter’s night a traveler and chapters about the reader, told entirely in second person point-of-view. It’s a mind-bending way to tell a story, but for nineteen-year-old me it was emboldening. You mean you can tell a story like this? In first chapters? Or in second-person? (Hello, past me, please meet our latest project, Kindling.) What else can you do? What else is out there?
“The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges was part of the reading for a course called “Literacy and the Book” by one of my favorite professors, Jody Greene. We read a lot of incredible material for that class, including Jeanette Winterson, Jacques Derrida, and one of my favorite books-about-books, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, but the one that really left its mark on me was “The Library of Babel,” one of those short stories that’s less of a narrative and more of a thought experiment, positing an infinite library of infinite, mostly nonsensical, texts. (If you’re thinking this sounds like the Book from The Reader, you’re absolutely right.) This is the semester I really started thinking about what a book is as well as what it can do, and the idea that a story is as much the way it’s told as the story itself is something I take with me into every new project.
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski—the story of a dude who finds a manuscript written by a blind man about a documentary that may or may not exist about a house that also may or may not exist—was recommended to me by two different friends, A.M. Hogan and Steve Stormoen, within the span of a couple weeks. Both of them said the book would turn my mind inside out. Both of them said I’d love it. Both of them said that once they started reading it, they had weird experiences with cats, and to prepare myself for the same. And they were right—it did turn my mind inside out, and I did love it, and when I got my roommate to read it at the same time I was, a cat followed her back to our house! Admittedly, now I think some of the content is difficult to get through, but the way the book uses the actual layout of the pages to tell the story influenced a lot about The Reader Trilogy, particularly The Storyteller, the textural interstitials in We Are Not Free, and, since it’s a book where some pages are almost entirely comprised of footnotes, of course, A Thousand Steps.
Since the publication of Kindling two months ago, I’ve been thinking about how there’s a lot to want when it comes to publishing: awards, bestseller lists, book club picks, TV deals, the list goes on and on and on. But in a recent interview for the Vulgar Geniuses Podcast (episode still to come), I talked about wanting to be the kind of writer who kicked down doors for other writers, and I think that’s actually one of the things I want most dearly and deeply in the reception of my work. To embolden someone? To make them go, “You mean you can tell a story like this? What else can you do?” To be someone’s formative inspiration? To be someone’s Watership Down or House of Leaves? To be part of someone’s literary lineage? Wow. What a privilege that would be. What a dream.
Upcoming events
Come see me this Saturday, May 4 at Bay Area Book Festival’s Family Day! I’ll be talking Dark Teen Storytelling with Sarah Lariviere, Darcie Little Badger, Sandra Proudman, Brittany N. Williams, and moderator Laura Gao from 3:00-3:45pm at the Berkeley Public Library Mystery Room. Book signing to follow on the 2nd floor, courtesy of Books Inc. Find the full schedule here.
In case you missed it
The paperback of You Are Here: Connecting Flights is available now! I’m so proud to be part of this short story collection, edited by Ellen Oh, and it’s such a thrill to see it garnering more and more attention—find it on the Texas Lone Star Reading List, the Michigan Association of State Librarians List, the Sequoyah Children’s Book Award, the Capitol Choices Noteworthy Books for Children and Teens, and more! Get it now from your favorite local retailer, or find it at one of the links here.
I’m part of another anthology, The House Where Death Lives, a YA horror collection edited by Alex Brown, and it comes out August 6! It includes one of the best short stories I’ve ever written, a story about being haunted by grief and by guilt, a story about a hungry House-of-Leaves-esque hallway and a ghost that refuses to look at you. It was just named a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection, and it’s now available for request on NetGalley! Pre-order it from your favorite local retailer or find it online at Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon.
Catch me on the Well-Read Podcast with Megan Bjerke! Megan is a bookseller, writer, and a huge fan of fantasy and romance, and it was so much fun chatting with her about writing, fantasy, and Leslie Knope. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your app of choice!
I’m in the March 2024 edition of Kirkus Reviews! It’s always such a pleasure to speak with thoughtful, incisive readers, and Vicky Smith always has the best observations, questions, and insights, so I loved spending some time talking Kindling with her. Click here for the full Q&A.
What I’m into these days
“Texas Hold ‘Em” by Beyoncé. Every so often, a song comes along that I just can’t stop listening to. I’ll play it on loop for days, sometimes weeks: a soundtrack for everything from brushing my teeth to writing to walking the dogs. Last year, it was “Cookie Cutter” by Ivory Layne, “Dirty Dancing” by Fionn, and “Cafe Deluxe” by Osei the Seventh. This year, I’m starting off with this infinitely catchy, infinitely singable country single.
Physical 100 Season 2 on Netflix. I’ll admit, the premise of this Korean reality TV series does not at all sound like my thing. In a quest to find “the perfect body,” contestants are put through a series of physical trials that remind me a little of American Gladiator from when I was a kid, but I absolutely adore this show. It’s surprisingly wholesome—to me, it’s less about the physical prowess of the competitors (although that’s absolutely jaw-dropping) and so much more about the spirit of healthy competition and sportsmanship between contestants as they encourage and respect one another. So watchable, so heartwarming.
Bacon and Egg Don on New York Times Cooking. You might remember me raving about Eric Kim’s matcha latte cookies this winter, and this another Eric Kim recipe that’s shooting right to the top of my favorites list. In a couple deviations from the recipe, we cut the bacon into lardons to sprinkle on top and slow-scramble the eggs until they’re the ooey-est, gooey-est, unctuous-est texture, but the flavors are so warm and so comforting, perfect with a side of homemade takuan!
Spring sunlight. I love winter for the holidays. I love summer for the sunshine, the flowers and fresh produce and BBQ and spending time outdoors. But one of my favorite things about spring is that the sun slants just-so through the living room windows, creating warm puddles of sunlight on the carpet where my dogs like to splay out and nap. There’s nothing like the pure joy of seeing your animals made happy by the simple things in life.
