PW: How would you describe your short fiction?
LS: My short fiction, like my novels, tends to be about what happens when people get what they ask for. It's a theme I never seem to tire of—that intersection between dreams and the real world.
PW: Do you think that intersection can be made successfully, or do you believe the "be careful of what you wish for" warning is wise?
LS: I think "be careful of what you wish for" is good advice. But if you are careful of what you wish for, a wish has enormous transformative powers.
PW: Of these stories, do you have a particular favorite?
LS: The stories I'm closest to are probably "Dirty Work" and "Sticks." I found a very emotional voice for the narrator of "Dirty Work" that I really like. In the case of "Sticks," I got to work through a real situation from my own life, besides doing some heavy-handed symbolism that I still think works pretty well.
PW: You're unflinching in your depiction of relationships, especially the father/son conflict in "Match." Was this difficult to write?
LS: Oh, yeah. And it's the hardest story in the book for me to read.
PW: Because of the autobiographical connection?
LS: Sure. It's a wish that I had that I'd never acted on toward my father, a homicidal wish, and seeing that homicidal rage in myself when I reread that story is pretty spooky. It went through as many rewrites as anything I've written—the first version that I sent out spent far too long detailing all the hurts the father inflicted on the son, probably to justify the son's behavior. But somebody convinced me that it came off as self-pitying, so I cut it to the bone.
PW: What's next?
LS: I'm in the early stages of my first novel to be set in North Carolina, where I'm living now. It's set in Durham, in the present, but the forces that drive the story originate back in the '60s, when a black neighborhood was bulldozed in the name of urban renewal and millions of federal dollars. Right now, it seems to want to be a detective novel.
PW: You're a musician as well as a writer. Describe the connection between music and words.
LS: Because of that background, I tend to write about the craft and the mechanics of playing music more than I write about music itself in the abstract, which is far more difficult. It's fertile territory for me because once again you have music as a sort of ideal in contrast with the realities of the musician's life.
PW: The New Yorker once described your work as "note perfect"—do you think that's even possible, in words or music?
LS: It's something to aspire to. You want to find words that are technically accurate and precise, but also evocative, rhythmic and fresh, all at the same time. For me, the discipline is to rewrite—by which I mean retype—over and over, keeping only the stuff I don't get tired of.
PW: Stephen King once compared his story construction to that of an excavation. Do you agree?
LS: Yeah, I feel like there's a sort of ideal form of the story, and that it's almost a piece of detective work to find it.
