KMWR: I always love to know the origin behind a story. What was it like writing the first draft of “Alice”? Did Alice’s character appear fully formed or did she grow as the story progressed?
LH: I don’t write drafts. I start with the first paragraph and add to it while going back each day to the beginning and reworking what I’ve written until I’m satisfied. My idea for Alice was to write about a person who felt stuck in her life, dissatisfied in almost every area and it was willing to try something drastic to change her life. I was a volunteer tour guide in Central Park in New York City for ten years. I was very proud of myself for being so good at it. Then I found out that my cousin who lives in Nevada was being paid to be a guide on bus tours. I felt one upped. I gave Alice my cousin’s job and made it awful. I used to go to an ashram and during a guided meditation we imagined wrapping the mantra around us. That notion inspired the character of Richie Trem.
KMWR: Family relations play a large part in your fiction. I’m thinking of your previously published works “Sighting Loveland” and “Parents and Children”. Even in “Alice” we find a bus full of aunts—three sets of triplets—and so I’m wondering what it is about families that your fiction wants to explore, solve, and/or prompt?
LH: I write about families because I’m interested in or angry at the effect parents have on their children. My story Parents and Children was inspired by reading that J.D. Salinger spent all his time writing about the Glass family whom he adored in a studio near his house and wouldn’t allow his real children to visit him there.
KMWR: I’d love to hear about how your writing life has evolved over your career. Can you discuss how your experience writing children’s books and even being a ceramicist has influenced your fiction?
LH: I started out as an illustrator. I illustrated children’s books and then I wrote them. In the beginning I had no confidence in my writing, and I let my editor change most of my sentences. I would not do that now. I’m interested in portraying women’s lives, and I do that in my ceramic sculptures and in my stories. I like to write more than I like to do ceramics. It’s hard to make ceramic figures look the way I want them to and then to have to hollow them out and glaze them and hope they don’t crack. When I write I enter the world of the story, the characters and situations are real to me. It’s my escape and the focus it requires dulls whatever is bothering me. Sometimes I’ll start to tell a friend about a situation that happened, and realize it was part of a story I wrote.
KMWR: What is your ideal writing session, and what do you like to have nearby as you write?
LH: I like to write for an hour as soon as I wake up. This delays my dog’s walk, but she’s ok with it and I feel the most alert then. I’ll write for an hour in the early afternoon and again at around five. My only bad habit is if I have a bag of nuts nearby and I eat all the nuts without realizing it. Nuts, as I found out, are very fattening.
KMWR: What have you been reading recently that you would recommend?
LH: I recommend Without You There Is No Us by Suki Kim. And One Friday in April: A Story of Suicide and Survival by Donald Antrim.
♤♡ ♧♢
Linda Heller has written and illustrated sixteen children’s books. Her books received the Parents Choice Award, the Bank Street Award, and the Sydney Taylor Award. The Castle on Hester Street is part of the third-grade curriculum nationwide.
She received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, had an honor story in The Best American Short Stories, and received a Literal Latte Fiction Award and was nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. She’s had short stories published in Boulevard, the Northwest Review, New Letters, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Quarter After Eight, Ascent, Typishly, the Write Launch, the Midway Journal, and other publications.
