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Elizabeth Gonzalez James is the author of the novel Mona at Sea, as well as the chapbook, Five Conversations About Peter Sellers. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Idaho Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Rumpus, StorySouth, PANK, and elsewhere, and have received numerous Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. Originally from South Texas, Elizabeth now lives with her family in Massachusetts.
Elizabeth Gonzalez James's website
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IR: One of the many things I loved about your novel was the strong sense of place. At times, the land itself seemed like a character with agency. How much are you inspired by landscape and environment in your writing?
EGJ: George Saunders says to lean into your strengths, and I think writing descriptions of place is a particular strength of mine, so I tried to get in as much as I could without being exhausting. I grew up in South Texas, so it was fairly easy for me to write about what it looks like and how it feels to walk around down there. It's unbelievably hot, humid, and sunny. I have no idea how anyone lived there before A/C. So I had a lot of fun finding different ways to say it's miserably hot and sunny. And then because of the magical nature of the book, I could take some liberties with the environment. I have vines of purple flowers unfolding and pointing to the sun; I have an ominous rust red winter sky over gray snow. I wanted to give the sense that anything could happen.
I read a short story collection by a Polish writer named Bruno Schulz, and if I recall correctly he never really left his very small and obscure village in Poland. The way he describes his hometown, though, it sounds positively ...
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