Alix and I were students together at the Michener Center for Writers, and she now teaches at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. She met with me in the city one rainy afternoon to discuss her changing relationship to plot, the themes in "Babylon," and self-marketing as an introspective person.
About.com: You’ve said before that your interest in writing stories lies more with characters than with plot. Is that where stories start for you? With a character rather than with a story?
Alix Ohlin: I wouldn't say that the stories necessarily start with a character, but that I can't really start writing until I come up with a character. In other words, I'll start with an idea for a setting or for a last line -- a place where I want the story to end -- but I can't do anything with that until I have a character to be the vehicle for the story.
AC: Won't that change the plot, then?
AO: Yeah, it will. And as a matter of fact, all of the things I just mentioned, the setting, the plot, will change when I actually start writing the thing, but they are the jumping off point, the gauzy idea for a story that gets destroyed and turns into the messy realities of the first draft.
AC: You've described your collection as being about “cracked domesticity.” How conscious were you of choosing that theme? At what point did you even realize that you had a theme?
AO: I only learned that way of talking about the book after its publication. In some ways it was the cover image of the book that made me conceptualize it that way. I always felt that the stories were too various to make a collection.
There's a real emphasis right now on collections of stories bound by things like geographical setting or ethnic identity, for example, and I was always worried that my stories weren't going to have enough of a common theme. But when people started to read the book and review it, they found all of these themes for me, things about suburbia and alienation, and I was taken aback. But maybe that's true for a lot of people, that you're not used to jumping outside your own work and you need other people to put those labels on it. You can't do it yourself.
