My dad died on the night my bathwater ran with an electric current in it. Or maybe it was the other way around. My water ran electric on the night my father died. In some ways that sounds better, more poetic, I guess. For one thing, it scans. Ba-duh ba-duh ba-duh ba-duh ba- duh ba-duh ba-duh. But it isn’t truly accurate as to what it felt like at the time. It felt more like the first way.

Do you know what happens in your stories before you start?

No. Not at all. I don’t know anything. The last story I wrote, “A Country Where You Once Lived,” began life as a story about a young woman who is going to her grandparent’s sixtieth wedding anniversary celebration. In the course of what I wrote, it turns out that she is having a romance with much older man whose third floor apartment she rents. And I wrote and wrote and wrote about this young woman. Wrote about her parents. Wrote about her uncle and his two kids. But more and more I would find my mind drifting to the man with whom she was sleeping, the guy whose third floor she occupied. And I started wondering what his deal was. And over the course of some months, the balance tipped and the story became his – and the original young woman just makes an appearance for a Skype sex scene.