An Interview with Lenore Myka

An interview with alum Lenore Myka (fiction, ’09), conducted by alum Lynette D’Amico (fiction, ’13) appears at Fiction Writers Review:

Eudora Welty referred to setting/location as, “the ground conductor of all the currents of emotion and belief.” The more specific the place, the more resonant and meaningful the action. How does location/setting function in King of the Gypsies?

A long time ago, I heard an elderly writer lament the lack of setting in the stories his students were producing in some MFA program somewhere. I do feel there is an absence of setting in the stories of my students. My younger students say that “description is boring,” as if description were synonymous with place. And yet, when you read people like Carver or Beattie, writers who were called, for better or worse, minimalists, I feel a deeply rooted sense of place in their stories. It’s because their characters embody those places in some mysterious way. It’s ye olde iceberg, right? Even if the place doesn’t go into the story, it’s there in the writer’s mind and through some strange process of osmosis reveals itself on the page somehow.

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