Like all of my previous work - which I also hope is a bit hard to categorise - 'The Oopsatoreum' is an illustrated book, so a combination of words and pictures that tell a kind of story.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Illustrations can be a big window: a looking glass into the author's imagination.
Once I'm given an idea for a story I have a million ideas on how it should be illustrated, but I don't have a big shoebox full of unfinished ideas.
I've been religiously reading the O. Henry Prize anthologies every year since college, when I first began trying to write stories. Many of the authors whose work I cherish the most were people I first learned about through The O. Henry Prize Stories - and then I'd go search for their books.
After about fourth grade, I do remember borrowing my mother's old portable Olivetti and typing stories out on the back of photocopies of journal articles.
I've been obsessed with this kind of visual storytelling for quite a while, and I try to create material that allows me to explore it.
The entirety of 'Bellocq's Ophelia' was a project, and I was interested in doing research and looking at photographs and writing about them, imagining this woman Ophelia and what her life was like and the kinds of things she thought about.
I love picture books - with picture books, you can use words and pictures as a double act, even tell two different versions of a story at the same time.
I think you can get a sort of intensity and an edginess offering nine stories in a book. Competing versions of things.
When I wrote the eight fairy tales that appear in 'Horse, Flower, Bird' I was working toward a completely new form of artistic expression, trying to create a new kind of tale that also felt vintage: innocent and childlike, but haunted. I tried to write a picture-less picture book.
One of the inspirations for my becoming a writer was the baseball board game Strat-O-Matic.
No opposing quotes found.