Elke, I did start Caribou Island, a novel, after writing Legend. I wrote 50 pages and got stuck. I was only 30 years old and somehow just couldn't see longer dramatic arcs then. It's easy now, but back then my mind couldn't do it. And I couldn't think of any other short stories to write, and I wasn't writing nonfiction yet at that point. I was pretty limited and stuck.

Aquarium was my first novel to not be a tragedy, so it's lighter in that way, though it's hard drama along the way.

The natural landscapes act like Rorschach tests, revealing shape and pattern of the mind, giving us the interior life of the character who is viewing. This happens in a lot of American fiction, a rural and regional literary tradition focused on landscape, from Melville and Hawthorne to Porter, Bishop, O'Connor, McCarthy, Proulx, etc., the most important literary tradition in the US (more than the urban novel).

The writers I just mentioned in my last post are my favorites, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and classics.

Last Day on Earth sold less copies than any of my other books because Americans are in denial and don't want to recognize that the shooters are veterans from our military and that having more guns around does in fact lead to more gun deaths.

It's the main reason I no longer live there.

I definitely write the books only for myself, never thinking of an audience, because in fact I didn't have any audience for 22 years of writing. But because I'm writing in the tradition, following the Greeks, readers do go through catharsis because of the dramatic arc. I've also studied and teach linguistics and think a lot about reader response. I just don't consciously worry about this when I'm composing new paragraphs.

I don't mean to horrify readers when I write about violence. It's never gratuitous but is always for a psychological reason. The boy's body in Legend was finally making my father's suicide real and acknowledged, for instance, and the buck killed in Goat Mountain is the way the boy gains empathy.

I'm really missing Alaska and want to go back soon.

I write every morning for an hour and a half or two hours, seven days a week. It's very important not to miss days because of momentum. All the unconscious or subconscious pattern will be there only if I write every day, and I need this because I write without any plan or outline or even any idea what the book will be about.

Back to the question of what writers I like.

For the landscape, it's just so enormous and majestic, and you can feel how frail and exposed you are, to cold and bears and mosquitos and storms at sea, etc. You can step back in time and not care about anything from the contemporary world. And it's all so beautiful, with so many surprises. I miss the landscapes most, which has such variety across the state.

I haven't read a lot of Coetzee. Only Disgrace. He's not an influence for me at all. I have met him a couple times, though, and I like him and admire his work. There are many authors I admire but am not influenced by. Influence is a special thing, work that offers a path.

Poe is not an influence for me either, and I hate horror and watched only the movies I had to to write about the school shooter (he loved the Saw movies, which are disgusting lies psychologically and offer torture as entertainment). I realize Poe is more than horror, and I did read him a lot in high school and college, so maybe I'm influenced and don't realize it, but I don't think I'm doing that kind of story, or at least not aimed at the same payoffs.

Ha. Funny. My comments about Alaska should of course be taken with a grain of salt. I don't live there anymore, and there's of course a wide range of people there. There's a smart community of writers and journalists, for instance, in Anchorage, and I really love them. But I've always thought Alaska showed, in extreme, what America is. It's the place of highest gun ownership, most suicides, very military, very conservative, and also pushes American polarization to an extreme, so we can see what America is if we look at Alaska, I think.

The bars in Ketchikan when I was a kid in the early seventies really were wild, with lots of fights, but back then it was only guys to the right beating each other up.