William, it’s been a true pleasure having you here; you’ve been very gracious with your time and answers, and we appreciate it! Thank you so very much. We’ll all be looking for your next novel!
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Thank you so much for having me! A true pleasure.
So as a youngster you were telling stories. The creative juices were flowing! Were there significant people in your life then who were storytellers and perhaps encouraged and influenced you? Did your grandparents tell stories to you about family, their experiences, etc.? On a different avenue, do you recall as a child if you had vivid dreams; perhaps characters or situations playing in your night time mind?
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I loved nothing more than listening to my grandparents tell stories. They weren’t writers or readers but they were great storytellers. Their parents had both come over from Italy, and they were both born in Brooklyn and didn’t stray too far from a fifteen or twenty block radius. My grandfather worked at Chevy on Coney Island Avenue and then became a fix-it guy. He told stories about drinking in a bar called the Cockroach Inn and his best friends were named Harry the Horse and Joe Pennsylvania. His stories lit up (and still light up) my imagination. My grandmother was warm and funny and so genuinely kind–no one could make me laugh like her. When I was a kid, I’d tape record and then transcribe their conversations. My grandparents and my mother encouraged me at every turn with my writing. To their great credit, they didn’t push me to have a back-up plan if writing didn’t work out. They brought me to the library and bought me books and supported me in every way.
As a child, I did have vivid dreams. I still do. I put a lot of stock in dreams. I lived with a bunch of visual artists in college, and they all had this routine where they’d talk through their wild dreams every morning–I loved it. I’ve definitely dreamed characters and situations that have wound up in my work. I used to wake up in the middle of the night and scribble things down. That doesn’t happen so much anymore, but some stuff lingers and influences what I’m working on. I love that sometimes a dream can influence the feeling of something I’m writing, so even if I’ve forgotten a dream the feeling it’s left me with has changed the course of things. I have recurring dreams–things that haunt me–and I certainly have experienced intense deja vu.