Victor LaValle on NPR

Faculty member Victor LaValle talks about his new novel, monsters, and writing in doughnut shops on NPR’s “Fresh Air.”

Doesn’t everybody love buffalo-headed monster roaming halls? I know I do. The real reason I put that in there is because my idea of fiction is that it’s different from, say, journalism because journalism’s job is to tell you what happened, and fiction to some degree is to make you understand how it felt to go through a certain experience.

And the difference between what happened versus how it felt sometimes requires the fantastical or the impossible or the strange, just to make you understand how powerfully an event affects a person. And so for me, the times that I’ve been in those hospitals, even as someone who was not even institutionalized at the time, I felt so much like I was in a haunted house...[Listen to the full story]…