Martin Seay biography

Interview

Martin Seay tells the story behing his debut novel, The Mirror Thief

In the spring of 2002, while living briefly in Washington, DC—where my then-girlfriend, now-spouse Kathleen Rooney was finishing her last year of college—I enrolled as a special student at Johns Hopkins to take a writing class called "Experimental Fiction."

It was a hell of a class. The instructor—Richard Peabody, a terrific writer and under-sung hero of indie publishing—had us turn in something like nine stories over the course of the semester, which exceeds the typical workload for such courses by about seven. Plus, the stories all had to be written to Richard's rather unpredictable prompts, so you couldn't just recycle your old material. (Unless, of course, your oeuvre already happened to include "a story in which all the dialogue is stolen from other works of fiction" or "a story in which you personally are a character, and which also features a character borrowed from an existing work of literature and a character borrowed from a cartoon," which it probably didn't.)

One night in March, Richard ended class with the assignment to write a story for the following week "in which someone tells a story in which someone tells a story." As I rode the Metro home, trying to figure out how best to...