Don Lee’s most recent novel is Wrack & Ruin.
–Name a childhood hero.
Eric Clapton
–Name a work you wished you’d written.
The Great Gatsby
–If you had to order your work by how successfully you completed what you set out to accomplish, what would that list look like?
Wrack and Ruin
Yellow
Country of Origin
–Name a writer in history you would’ve like to have been a contemporary of and why.
John Cheever. I hear he told great stories.
–Name a work of yours whose reception you’ve been surprised about and why.
Yellow—it surprises me, the legs this book has had, given that they’re short stories, but it’s because the book has been adopted for college courses, which surprises me even more.
–Correct a misperception about you as a writer in fifty words or less.
That I’ve had it easy as a writer because I was an editor. If anything, being an editor hurt me, because when people received my submissions, they probably thought it was pathetic, another editor wanting to be a writer.
–Name a trait you deplore in other writers.
Preciousness.
–Name your five desert island films.
Sex and Lucia
Princess and the Warrior
Lovers of the Arctic Circle
Lost in Translation
Bourne Identity
–Name a book not your own that you wish everyone would read.
Stoner by John Williams
–Name a book you suspect most people claim to have read, but haven’t.
Anything by Faulkner
–If you could choose one of your works to rewrite, which would it be and why.
I have a weird habit, which is to take bits of previous stories or books and incorporating them, verbatim, into new stories or books. I don’t know why I do this, but it’s fun for me.
–Share the greatest literary secret/gossip you know.
Someone I know used to send out another writer’s work under his name, without telling him.
–Name a book you read over and over for inspiration.
Gatsby.
–Name the writing habit you rely on to get you through a first draft.
I tell myself, You can fix this later.
–Name a regret, literary or otherwise.
I should’ve had kids.
–Name your greatest struggle as a writer.
Always doubting myself, wondering if the well is dry, if I have any real talent.
–Name a question you get about writing to which there really is no good answer.
“Who are your influences?” Because everything is an influence.
–Name a question you wish you had been asked.
“Would you like to sleep with me?”