Return to Linn's Top Page   Return to Linn's Client List

Q.    What is your primary motivation for writing?
 
 A.        I  write primarily to alleviate the overwhelming guilt I feel when I'm not writing.  That said, I also write to have fun, to feel complete and vital.  These two motivators aren't as contradictory as they might seem.  It's the guilt that gets me to turn on the computer and to start tapping half-heartedly at the keys, but, after a half hour or so of swimming through molasses, something clicks, the words flow, time stops, and I become ecstatic.  Once I get past the wall of resistance of preparing to write, once I'm in the thick of the process, it's this sense of ecstasy that keeps me going.

Return to Linn's Top Page   Return to Linn's Client List

As for her -- the Angel who watched Zander jump -- her name is Cassie O'Connor.  The famous Cassie O'Connor.  She's a therapist, one of the few in the country to specialize in dysfunctional Angels.  The thing she's famous for, though, is her book,The Angel Blues, a bestselling, pop-psych, Oprah-ization of her case studies, complete with glaring generalizations and easy answers.  Cassie is also a fraud -- a fact she's waiting for her public to realize.
        At the moment, she does her waiting -- famously -- standing by the famous window of her famous office, looking out at the patients she's made infamous.  Yesterday, the city ran a hose from a fire hydrant to the courtyard just outside her office. The firemen, dressed in helmets and yellow slickers, cranked open the spigot for a happier task than usual.  The water gushed and gurgled, making a pleasant background ssshhhh for most of the afternoon, and forming a wonderfully huge puddle.  It is late February, and winter is having its last fling.  Yesterday's puddle is therefore frozen today, providing the season's last rink.
       Some of the hospital staff have brought their children with their skates, and they are out there now, laughing, playing tag with mittened hands, starting at one end and building speed, twisting to stop and sending up rooster tails of shaved ice.  Snow drifts across the glassy surface in their wake, gathering in lines and loops, spirals here and there, almost... something, almost someone's cursive script, almost saying something, before scattering, and almost writing something else.
       Some of Cassie's clients are out there, too, among the half-thoughts and  squiggles, gliding with the rest, arms and wings spread happily, laughing.  To look at them now, you'd think Cassie's critics were justified -- those who referred to "Angel therapy" with the same arched eyebrows and quotes they usually reserved for "Pet Cemetery."  She checks the time; the group session should have started five minutes ago.  Cassie sighs fog onto the window and smears it away.
        One little boy in a powder blue coat and black wool stocking cap seems to have invented a game, maybe called "Bowling for Angels."  He starts by running full throttle at one of Cassie's clients, and pulls himself into a ball just before striking.  The patients hop, cup their wings and hang in the air for a second, as the boy whizzes under their feet, and into a snowbank surrounding the rink.  The boy hits the bank again and again, each time sending up happy puffs of snow.  And each time he gets up, giggling, loving this utterly and completely and almost as much as the patients do.
        The boy is maybe three or four and has never known a world without Angels.  They, and the rest of the world are his friends, his playmates.  Unlike Cassie, he doesn't know that the Angel in red he's just zipped by has rope burns underneath her scarf, that the one in green tried tranquilizers, or that the one in blue was found in a Neiman Marcus window display, crying inconsolably.  All he knows is that when he smiles, they smile back -- and they're really hard to catch!
       Whizzz-puff.
        More giggling, more smiles, more tugging on wings with mittened hands, "Let's do it again.  C'mon, please, please, please..."
       Cassie knows she should send an attendant to remind her truants about the group session, to bring them down to earth and the merciless slouching toward diagnosis.  Should probably, but won't.  If nothing else, that's one of the things Cassie has learned in her years as an Angel and a therapist: Respect joy. Joy is not something that happens instead of something else important; it isn't a waste of time; it is, really, what time was invented for.  It happens almost never, and if you don't respect it, it happens less and less.  Cassie should know, not being overjoyed -- or overly joyous -- by anyone's definition, especially lately.
       So, no, she won't interfere.  They'll come for her when they need her, she knows, and more's the pity.  'Til then, it's enough to leave them out there, where they can break her heart and do their own some good.
       And then, the inevitable happens: One of the children throws himself backwards in the snow, works his arms and legs.  Steam comes out of his innocent mouth... steam, meaning words, words Cassie can predict.  "Lookit me," he says, in the brittle chill of this Christmas card tableau.  "Lookit me; I'm an Angel!"
       Every thing -- and one -- freezes.  A parent, politically correct to the n-th degree, bolts to the rescue, yanking the child up with one frightening tug, brushing off the snow with more force than is normally associated with a full-out thrashing.  More steam from both their mouths -- the child's sobs, the parent's hurried explanation about people of all kinds and their feelings, about all the things we just don't do anymore, like wear black face, or make Angels in the snow.
       The mother turns to Cassie's patients, tries to blame this inadvertent mobilist faux pas on an ex-husband who still has visitation rights.  More steam.  None of it comes from the Angels.  They have big lungs and can hold their breath for the duration of this ugliness.  They get regular practice.  When the red one starts crying, it's not for any slight, mobilist or otherwise.  She's crying for the brittleness of everything nowadays, for all the breath-holding, and hand-holding, for the whole, general touchiness of the world.  She's crying, mainly, for the moment that lies in pieces before her, for the memory of what and who she is, and where.
       And one by one, they come back inside -- to Cassie, and her real world.
       The weatherpeople are predicting rising temperatures and rain.  By mid afternoon, the rink will be a puddle, again.  Cassie wonders for a moment whether she should turn the group around, send them back out, in search of a little more joy.  Maybe she should put on her skates and join them.       Instead, she straightens chairs, listening to her Angels in the hallway, slurping off their skates, sshhing out of parkas, stamping feet, rubbing shoulders, rustling wings -- doing whatever it takes to get warm.

Return to Linn's Top Page   Return to Linn's Client List

        I  also  write because it's  just really fun making stuff up -- lying, really -- and not only not getting punished for it, but praised.  Writing is also a way of making all the meaningless junk of your life relevant, by transforming it into source material that can be bent a little bit this way and a little bit that way to make the latest lie all the more believable.  And getting all those little bits and pieces to fit together into something new that gets people to laugh and cry and turn pages past the point when they really should be going to bed because they've got work in the morning... well, I like being able to do that.  It's the sort of thing that makes my dark, mischievous heart smirk.

 
Q.   Who or what particularly influences your work?

A.   I've been influenced by a wide range of writers, for better or worse.  For example, I like the seriocomic quirkiness and convoluted plotting of Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, Tom Robbins, John Irving, and Jeremy Leven, while at the same time striving for the clean subtlety and depth of writers like Charles Baxter, Ethan Canin, J.D. Salinger, James Joyce of The Dubliners, Carol Shields, Barbara Kingsolver, and Michael Cunningham.  I like the magic realism of Kafka, Calvino, Ionesco, and Marquez, and the science fiction of Ray Bradbury, Orson Scott Card, and Arthur C. Clarke.  And when I need inspiration and a laugh, Anne Lamott's Bird By Bird always does the trick.

Q.   Describe your writing process.

A.   I usually start with a "What if...?" premise, try to figure out what the obvious or conventional conclusion or treatment of that premise would be, and then react against that conclusion or treatment.  Then I start taking notes concerning possible characters, titles, plot developments, settings, and scenes -- especially opening and closing scenes.  If it's a long work, the notetaking process can take up to a year or more, and will continue throughout the drafting process.  During this phase, I make sure to have notebooks all over my house; I carry a microcassette recorder with me in the car so I can capture ideas that occur to me while driving to and from work.  Once I've got a pretty good idea of the general shape of the work -- and my notetaking efforts have reached some sort of mysterious, critical mass -- I begin writing actual scenes and actual chapters.  Coming up with the right opening scene is critical when it comes to moving me out of the simple notetaking phase into the actual drafting phase, and there are usually a few false starts along the way to coming up with the first scene.
        I have an office in my home where I write, and have outfitted it with full spectrum light bulbs that simulate natural sunlight.  I compose directly on the computer, and usually play instrumental music on my stereo to mask background noise.  The soundtrack from the movie A Clockwork Orange is one I use frequently.  I also usually switch off the ringer on my telephone and tune down the volume on my answering machine so I won't be distracted by incoming calls.

Q.   What inspired you to write on the subjects you have chosen?

A.   My novel RAPTURE grew out of a short story I wrote in the early 1980's called "Fix," about a heroin addict who inexplicably sprouts wings and becomes as fatally addicted to flight as she had been to heroin.  The inspiration for that story really came from a picture.  I was living in Fairbanks, Alaska at the time and was working on a collection of short stories as part of my master's thesis for an MFA in Creative Writing.  While thinking about nothing in particular, I noticed the cover of The New American Review, Number 14 (Simon and Shuster, 1972), which features a blonde, sylph-like and dreamy-looking woman, naked save for a few fluttering streamers and sandwiched between a poppy to the left and a large, strategically placed wing to the right.  The poppy triggered associations with drugs and addiction in my head while the wing triggered... well, wings.  From there, I started thinking about angels, and freewill, and whether angels had more or less.  I wondered how one might tempt an angel, and then returned to the image of the poppy.  "What about an angel on drugs?" I thought, and it wasn't too much after that that I made the leap to, "What about an angel addicted to flying?"  "No," I then thought.  "What about an addict with wings?"  I wrote that one up and several years later, I started thinking, "What about a lot of addicts with a lot of wings?"  Several years and several painful drafts later, I turned in the final draft of RAPTURE to my editor at Villard.

Return to Linn's Top Page   Return to Linn's Client List

        I was born in 1959 in Taylor, Michigan, a working class, downriver suburb of Detroit, and I have recently purchased a home in my old neighborhood, where I live with a six-toed, black cat named Obsidian but called "Sid.".  In between birth, homeownership, and cat-pampering, I:  got my BA in English Lit from the University of Michigan-Dearborn; moved to Fairbanks, Alaska, where I got an MFA in Creative Writing, edited a small literary journal called permafrost, and taught freshman comp for two years; moved back to Detroit and continued teaching freshman comp and creative writing for three more years at the universities of Michigan, Detroit, and Wayne State; moved to Washington, DC, to become a program analyst for the Environmental Protection Agency, and moved back to Michigan to work for EPA's motor vehicle lab in Ann Arbor (where I continue to work today).
        In between all that hopping around, I have written and published various pieces of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, having work appear in publications such as Alaska Quarterly Review, Passages North, River City, The Bridge, The MacGuffin, Lipservice, The MetroTimes, The AWP Newsletter, Heartland, Alaska Today and Creative Computing.  I've also ghostwritten single-panel cartoons, which have appeared in assorted business and computer publications, as well as Health, Natural History, Harper's and People.  In 1994, Barbara Kingsolver chose my short story, "Useless Things," as the first-place winner for the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize.
        In 1995, I won a grant from the Arts Foundation of Michigan to complete work on a novel-in-progress (begun and fleshed out during two residencies at the Ragdale artists' colony in Lake Forest, Illinois).  That novel -- RAPTURE -- was purchased by Villard Books and first released in September 1996.

Return to Linn's Top Page   Return to Linn's Client List

Fiction

"Cogito, Ergo Sum" and "Entelechy," Tales of the Marvelous Machine: 35 Stories of Computing, Robert Taylor and Burchenal Green, editors, Creative Computing Press, April 1980.

"Granpa's a Duck," Heartland, David Stark, fiction editor, Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, 11-18-84.

"Demon Ralph: A Christmas Story," Heartland, 12-23-84.

"The Manly Art of Boxing," Heartland, 2-3-85.

"Fix," Alaska Quarterly Review, Ronald Spatz, fiction editor, Fall/Winter 1986.

"The Dwowning Man," The MacGuffin, Experimental Fiction Special Issue, Arthur Lindenberg, Volume VI, Number II, Summer 1989.

"Will You Please Be Post-Modern, Please?" briX, Josie Kearns, editor, Volume 4, Number 1.

"The Man W/ The Heart From K-marts," Lip Service, Robert Haynes, editor, Spring/Fall 1990, Volume 4.  Winner, Editor's Choice Award, June 1990.  Reprinted Metro Times Annual Summer Fiction Issue, August 5, 1992.

"Absolution," Lip Service, Sunil Freeman, guest editor, Spring/Fall 1991, Volume 5.

"A Duck's Secret," Passages North, Mary LaChapelle, fiction editor, Winter 1991, Volume 12, Number 2.

"Formaldehyde," River City, Sharon Bryan, editor, Fall 1992.

"The Numismatist," The Bridge, Helen Zucker, fiction editor, Summer/Fall 1994.

"Knowing," WordWrights, Sunil Freeman, guest editor, Summer 1995.

RAPTURE, Villard Books (Random House), September 1996 (U.S. hardcover edition).
RAPTURE, Sceptre Books (Hodder and Stoughton), December 1996 (U.K. first edition); June 1997 (U.K. paperback); July 1997 (U.K.  paperback, second printing).  RAPTURE, Bantam Books, October 1997 (U.S. paperback).
 

Poetry

"Famous Monsters," Rebirth of Power: Overcoming the Effects of Sexual Abuse through the Experiences of Others, Pamela Portwood, Michele Gorcey, Peggy Sanders, editors, Mother Courage Press, 1987.

"Standing W/ My Lover's Lover By A Cliff In Moss Beach, California," 5 AM, Jim Daniels, editor, Winter 1988.

"Dr. Mengele Experiments W/ Levitation" and

"Wires," Wayne Literary Review, Brian Bragg, editor, Spring 1988.

"Naked Haiku," "Variations," and "Dr. Mengele Experiments W/ Levitation," The MacGuffin, Volume VI, Number III, Fall 1989.

"Carnal Knowledge" and "Surgeons Sew Man's Head Back On," briX, Volume 4, Number 1.

"A Dream the Car Dealer Had," "Why Denise Won't Eat Pizza," and "I Do Bathrooms," Lip Service, Sunil Freeman, guest editor, Spring/Fall 1991, Volume 5.

Non-fiction

"An Hypothesis To Explain The Retrograde Rotation of Venus," Observer's Sky, May 1975.

"Fairbanks, In The Winter," Metropolitan Detroit, December 1984.

"Winter in the Land of Christmas Trees," Alaska Today, 1985-86.

"Inside: University of Alaska-Fairbanks," AWP Newsletter, October 1985.

"Confessions of a Kid Con Artist," Coins, October 1987.

(With R.E. Stratton) "The Camera Eye and Two Freshman Writers," Arizona English Bulletin, Spring 1984.

(Contributor/consultant, teaching manual for:) The World of Science: An Anthology For Writers, Gladys Leithauser and Marilynn Bell, editors, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1987.

 

Sosnowski Interview

Rapture Excerpt

Publications

Awards & Honors

Biographical Statement

E-mail Dave

  

Return to Linn's Top Page   Return to Linn's Client List

  

---

 
 
 
 
Awards/Honors

First and third place, Fejes Fiction Prize, 1985
(judge: Hilma Wolitzer).

Third place, River City Fiction Prize, 1992
(judge: David Leavitt).

First place, Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, 1994
(judge: Barbara Kingsolver).

Arts Foundation of Michigan grant recipient, 1995.

Pushcart Prize nominee for fiction, 1995.

Ragdale Foundation resident 1993, 1994, 1995.

Return to Linn's Top Page   Return to Linn's Client List