I think of my writing career as starting around the time I was twelve-years-old and living in Gentilly, the New Orleans neighborhood in which this story opens. I wrote these massive sci-fi space opera things by hand in binders that never stopped growing. I became a professional writer, meaning I got paid, when I was about 17. The novel they bought was a kind of Michael Crichtonish thriller. Back then I never pulled directly from my life–at least not consciously. In fact, I remember my publisher's editorial letter including a plea for more visual detail from New Orleans and I'm from New Orleans.

In college, while living in New York, I realized how rich individual life experiences are–how much material we can mine from the things that occur in our lives. I saw how you can use fiction to search for meaning in the many individual pieces that make up your emotional memory. Hazy, but powerful experiences can stay cloudy and confusing or even completely forgotten forever unless we really dig into them. I was on this big journey of self-discovery in New York, which sounds cliche, but doesn't make it any less true. Part of the process was looking back inwardly and pulling up the pieces of my past, big pieces and little pieces alike, and putting them together in different combinations in prose, so that they became fiction.

So, in this story, Finn lives in a house in Gentilly that has sliding glass doors through which you can see a small but lush green back yard. That's a remembered image from my childhood in our Gentilly house. It's an image I associate with my life in New Orleans. I remember being eleven-years-old and talking about Mardi Gras, food and family with my mom. I had emotion-filled conversations sitting on a sofa in that room, looking out through those sliding glass doors. I dropped that memory and its associated emotion into a story alongside scenes from my experiences with an intense but ultimately failed relationship that began in Europe and included London and an Edinburgh hillside. I dropped all of that into this big gumbo pot with Hurricane Katrina and stirred it a while and came up with this piece of fiction (because it's absolutely fiction, not biography.) The things that happen in the story didn't actually happen. They're actions built around those emotions and memories I mentioned, among others. And because it was fiction, it allowed me to learn things I wouldn't have otherwise. Things I associated with me were now associated with someone else–a fictional protagonist not based on me. I could look at them without self-bias.

I didn't live in New Orleans proper when Katrina hit. We lived in a town about forty minutes north-northeast, right in the path of the eye. Those were interesting times.

Absolutely. New Orleans. I feel like a relationship with New Orleans is more like an erotic romantic entanglement, sometimes, than a normal love for a city. It's not so much a matter of preference, but an absolute need to be there. I experience feelings about New Orleans after a long wonderful day there that I don't even know how to begin describing yet. I love New York also–the city and the Hudson Valley just north of the city. I'd like to live there again for a while, but I love New Orleans.