In your short story, “Firebreak”, There is a ton of underlying familial tension between Tim, his brother Buck, and their father Carl. The three navigate their relationship after Tim’s return from the army and the death of their mother.  What was your inspiration for this piece?

I actually think of this as a climate change story about how returning to a traditional way of living is increasingly desirable and unattainable, because most of the tensions between the family members are externally imposed by the bank and the fire, the loss in their family and potential loss of land, a story where the home that used to sustain them doesn't anymore, and how they weather a firestorm by relying on unity and a willingness to endure shared suffering.

What is your writing process? Do you have a standard routine, or does it change from story to story?

I wrote a batch of stories a couple years ago using a standard routine where I kept a little notebook I called my seed garden, with two or three-line descriptions of story ideas. When I had five or ten of those, I'd pick three and write a two-page plot summary, then pick the one I liked best and build it up through five or six drafts, starting with the plot, then fleshing out the characters and settings, and towards the end getting them thematically balanced and easy-seeming, trying to get the music right. For a few years before that I was working on a historical novel where I had an overabundance of firsthand  information, so I just wrote everything down as well as I could understand it and ended up with a half-million word novel with no plot at all apart from what happened, which I'm told is totally unsalable, so I'm trying to be more efficient now and writing a novel using the same routine.

This piece posits familial love as something intertwined with work and self-sacrifice. How has your familial relationships informed the relationship on the page?

I spent about twenty years traveling, moving every year or less, so I'd say I have pretty shallow roots, which is maybe why I'm drawn to people who don't, or maybe I've just spent a lot of time in countries where people don't normally leave home for college, or necessarily ever leave home, where families with dozens of members or more all live in the same neighborhood, on the same farm or in the same apartment building. I live in Colombia now and I was at a villa like that over New Year's with my girlfriend's family – she's got twenty aunts and uncles, maybe sixty cousins, so I've always gotten the impression it's the most natural way to live, but being around it I also feel free from the work and self-sacrifice involved in things like family politics, arguments and mediation, all the things you can't say and the way we naturally squeeze ourselves into limited roles, how vulnerable family life makes you to something as simple as a dirty look from people who can give or withhold love at their own discretion, all of which makes for a much better story than the ramblings of a drifter passing through, so I think familial tension finds its way onto the page more through necessity than personal experience.

Tim’s experience as a veteran is misunderstood by those in the story who haven’t served. Why did you choose to explore this aspect of Tim’s life?

Probably to make good use of my own misunderstandings. Two of my best friends growing up, Ethan Biter and Nate Jones, joined the military out of high school (Annapolis and the Citadel) and they're two people whose integrity I've always admired, so Tim might be modeled on them at that age (though he's named for the author Tim O'Brien). The year before I wrote it I shared an apartment with an ex-Marine who'd served in Afghanistan and told great stories, like most service members do, so he's a likely influence as well. I still remember a story he told about being punished for some infraction or other by having to certify the authenticity of his platoon's urine tests, which he referred to as “meat-gazing duty” and which, for example, helped me to see my own misunderstandings regarding the extent of a soldier's duties and depth of commitment. Maybe not the best example, but it does speak to the values that lead Tim to sacrifice an easier future in favor of his family and his traditional place in the world, even when the family's broken and the bankers are circling and the world's burning down around them.

What drew you to writing short stories?

My mother makes quilts, usually in the winter watching Eagles and Flyers games, she always had a quilting hoop on her lap and over the years she's made about a hundred quilts. They're piled up in my parents' house, she gives them away as gifts, sold some of them, most not, I've got four of them on my couch here in Colombia, so since I was a kid I've been used to the idea of having a project going most of the time, where you do a little every day and end up with something good that people will like so you can give it to them. I usually prefer novel writing because of that day-to-day quality, and I just wrote a batch of short stories that racked up two hundred rejections in a year, so it might be a while before I write any more, but they are fun to do so I'm sure I'll get back to them eventually.

For those who enjoy your work, whose work would you recommend?

Someone different. Reading is how you time-travel, and get into the minds of people from other countries, people much older or younger than you, a way you can go to space or the bottom of the ocean, to different planets where humanity is better, or drop in on high-society where everyone is good-looking and nobody farts, or inhabit dark places with monsters and fairies and magic spells, because reading is everything our prophet of the book Lavar Burton promised.

For this story in particular I bet I took a look in a book of Flannery O'Connor stories and a Katherine Anne Porter collection. From other times and places I like O. Henry and Poe, “Daisy Dolls” (Felisberto Hernández), “A Portrait of Shunkin” (Junichiro Tanizaki), “Bloodchild” (Octavia Butler), “Sonny's Blues” (James Baldwin), “The Yellow Wallpaper” (Charlotte Perkins Gilman), “Bartleby” (Melville), “Where Are You Going...?” (Oates), “Penal Colony” (Kafka), the bonkers tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann, eight of Salinger's Nine Stories, anything by Nadine Gordimer, Deborah Eisenberg (who got me into about half the writers I mentioned above), Ottessa Moshfegh tickles me in the stranger danger way I like, I just read the collections “Black Tickets” by Jayne Anne Phillips and “Many Lives” by Kukrit Pramoj, both of which I found browsing in secondhand shops, which I also recommend, I read my son “Rikki Tikki Tavi” the other day, and what's that Bradbury story set on a planet where the sun only comes out once every ten years, and on that one sunny day the bad kids lock the good kid in the closet before they go outside, have you read that one?

Unfortunately, I haven't read that Ray Bradbury story. I have read quite a few of those pieces you mention, however—J.D. Salinger's "Nine Stories" and "Sonny's Blues" are some of my absolute favorites and really stand out as works that incorporate the themes of family, familial growth, and loss. Salinger's Glass family stories are, in my opinion, essential reading. As an author, how do you go about synthesizing these influences? Does it occur naturally, or is it a process you consider?

My first and second drafts are usually full of partially developed ideas, themes that appear and disappear in the same paragraph, characters who won't assert themselves, and pretty shoddy writing. Draft after draft the weakest themes die out, the boring characters get cut, and all the leftover fragments with good ideas start to attract each other, mini-thoughts get more complex and thorough, and after the fourth or fifth draft the story isn't so crappy anymore. Anne Lamott described the same process in her essay "Shitty First Drafts", which I recommend to anybody frustrated by their own slow pace and disappointing results in the early stages.

Read David’s story, “Firebreak” in dulcet Literary magazine, vol. One, Issue No. 2, coming this february.