JS: I'm so impressed with the fluidity of the point of view in your novel; by the end of the book all of your characters are so real and multi-faceted. Did you start with this POV or experiment with others first?
CS: I think my first thought was that I needed to tell Torch through Claire's point of view, simply because she is the character who has the most in common with me, being a young woman who lost her mother young to cancer. Pretty quickly I realized that telling this family's story through only Claire's perspective was going to limit me in ways that I didn't want to be limited. I didn't want to tell Claire's story, but rather the story of the whole family. I've always loved stories that embrace the kind of complexity you have when you, as a reader, get to experience a situation through more than one perspective. So early on I was trying to tell this story through the eyes of each of these people, but I did go back and forth about whether I should do it in the first person voice or the third person. Finally, it became really clear to me that third person allowed me more range and depth of consciousness -- especially in the case of characters who were rather unconscious of their own motivations -- than the first person would.
JS: I'm also very impressed by the vividness of the setting in your novel [Northern Minnesota]. Did you have to go back to do research?
CS: I didn't do any research, but like the story, the setting has autobiographical roots. I grew up in rural Aitkin County, Minnesota, on which the fictional Coltrap County is loosely based. I wrote from memory and from my impressions of the place and the landscape and the kind of people I knew growing up. None of the characters are based on any one actual person, but many are composites of the people I know in northern Minnesota.
JS: I know that your mother died when you were young. Is this a book you knew you wanted to write? Did you resist writing it?
CS: I didn't resist writing about this subject, instead I wrote about it over and over again, in my short stories, in my essays, and in this novel. I was 22 when my mom died of cancer. I believe that whenever someone we love dies, a piece of ourselves goes with them. In the case of my mother, a very big part of me went with her. I had to essentially recreate my life in the face of her death. My family disintegrated. Very quickly, I was truly alone in the world. While this was going on, I was becoming a writer. It was inevitable that this was the story I was going to tell -- not that I told a truly autobiographical story in Torch -- but rather that what I experienced and learned in my life so far would inevitably be poured into Torch. I fictionalized enormously, taking liberties in every direction, but the story is rooted in that very real heartbreak.
JS: What was the first thing you ever tried to write?
CS: I'm one of those writers who felt a very strong urge to write from a young age. I wrote my first stories as soon as I learned how to write. When I was 19 or 20 and in college I took a creative writing workshop and began to write on a more serious level then. Torch is the first novel I wrote.
JS: Do you have any writing rituals/requirements (coffee, the morning, certain music)?
CS: No rituals. I always thought that someday I would have one so I could be like those writers I've long admired who report waking each morning at six and writing until noon and then going out to work in their garden or play tennis after lunch and a nap, but the truth is, I write when I can, when I must, when I have a baby sitter, and when I have something due to an editor.
