Your tale in this week’s issue, “Herman Melville, amount 1,” is mostly about a young girl whom happens to be drifting from city to city in Oregon along with her boyfriend, Evan. The storyline starts as she’s carrying almost all their stuff — “two skateboards, two backpacks, the banjo with its scratched-up case” — and searching for Evan, that has disappeared. Do you constantly know you’d begin the storyline because of this, along with your homeless protagonist holding the exact carbon copy of two houses on the straight straight straight back?

Actually, we can’t say for sure where I’m likely to begin a whole tale until we begin

I work from there toward a greater understanding of the picture for me, a first sentence is often like a crazy blob of paint that my subconscious throws down on the page — and then. Needless to say, we quickly respected the foundation of the woman — and realized that she’d been lurking during the straight straight back of my head for a while. Read More