Dylan Landis is the author of the debut novel-in-stories Normal People Don’t Live Like This, which made Newsday’s Best Books of 2009 and More magazine’s Top 100 Books Every Woman Should Read. She has won a 2010 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and is working on a novel. Congratulations, Dylan!

 
 
Can you tell us about your road to publication?
It was pretty rare. Rob Spillman, the editor of Tin House, discovered one day that he had two stories of mine on his desk: one the staff had picked in a contest for Summer Literary Seminars, and one they had accepted as a magazine submission. He phoned and asked what else I had—and what I had was a novel, just finished. Rob published both stories and introduced me to six agents, four of whom offered to represent the novel. In hindsight, it hardly matters that no publisher took the novel. In the next five years I finished a story collection, Normal People Don’t Live Like This.

How did you maintain the faith to continue writing?
What faith? I write without it. I’d feel awful if I quit—halfway to worthless. You have this great quote on your own Facebook page, from Anais Nin: “We write to taste life twice.” Tasting life twice is so marvelously intense. What would require great faith, for me, is giving that up. 

What advice would you give to struggling writers?
Teach yourself how to read the way a writer needs to read.

What is the best advice you have ever received?
Have the patience to do the work, and the faith that you can get it done. Jim Krusoe said that. I am short, sometimes, in the faith department.

Can you talk a little about your writing process?
Erratic, driven, distractible, despairing, compulsive, manic, near-daily, sometimes painful (nerve damage in hands), hypercaffeinated, slow, distractible (yes, again). Addicted to revision.

At what hour of the day does inspiration strike? (Or what time of the day do you feel the most productive?)
Inspiration is not a biorhythm–it’s an unexpected gift. And writing happens when the laptop is on. It stops when my hands hurt. Then it starts again. This week, inspiration struck when a Sven Birkerts review of a Jane Smiley novel made some points that were critical for my novel-in-progress. I’ll be thinking about it for months.           

What books are on your nightstand?
Triple Time, by Anne Sanow. Linked stories with a powerful sense of place. Sanow is fearless about writing from other points of view.

Famous Fathers, by Pia Ehrhardt. Sometimes you look at a particular kind of Ehrhardt sentence, the way it flicks out so quick and alarming, and you think, uh-oh: snake. Pia does trouble brilliantly

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, by Robin Black. I just started this—love the way two intense and very different things are happening simultaneously in the first story.

Rattlesnakes & The Moon, by Darlin’ Neal. Frederick Barthelme, Antonya Nelson and Kevin Canty blurbed these stories gorgeously; I’m loving them.

Away, by Amy Bloom. I’m writing about Away (in geological time) on my own blog because I think it contains a whole MFA in creative writing if you dismantle it carefully.

Pretty, by Kim Chinquee. She’s the queen of flash fiction—spare, disturbing little stories, like shards of glass. I’m interviewing her for JMWW.

Should I stop here? It’s a big stack.

What is your favorite café?
In Santa Monica, the 18th Street Coffee House, with its New Orleans-style courtyard. Now I’m in DC, and the Starbucks on 7th and E Street NW is my office. Great staff, and the noise level is perfect for blocking out.

What’s next?
A novel about a woman in serious trouble in New York City, but almost a century earlier than Normal People Don’t Live Like This.

Buy Dylan’s book http://goo.gl/sXsN 

Visit Dylan’s website at http://www.dylanlandis.com/