Valerie Trueblood
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Valerie Trueblood is the author of a novel-in-stories and four collections of short stories, including Search Party: Stories of Rescue, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her new collection, Terrarium: New & Selected Stories, will come out from Counterpoint this month. She lives in Seattle. |
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I don’t set out to throw the reader any curves. I do think life often does that, though—starts out as one thing and becomes another—while we’re still working on the plan. My stories probably reflect my feeling that illusion is in play a great deal of the time in ordinary life, misleading us, protecting us. My interest is in how people respond when things happen to them that they’re not prepared for—accidents, being in the right or wrong place, moments when the current of one life goes heavily across the current of another. The mind always looks for a pattern, but I don’t like the imposed pattern that tidies up a lot of novels—some secret that explains everything, or some curative episode. The short story, in its acceptance of the unsolved, often seems to me more vast than the novel.— Excerpted, with permission, from an interview by Roxane Gay |
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