Jim Krusoe

Jim Krusoe has written five books of poems, a book of stories, Blood Lake, and a novel, Iceland, which was selected by the Los Angeles Times and the Austin Chronicle as one of the ten best fiction books of 2002, and was on the Washington Post list of notable fiction the same year. His latest book is Girl Factory.

From a Q & A at his publisher's website:

Your books and stories are highly unusual and often border on madcap – men rowing in a lake of blood, or falling into volcanoes, or discovering women suspended in yogurt – what inspires you to push storytelling to its limits?

I’m interested in how much we need to believe in stories, and how far we will go to suspend disbelief. I can feel every cell of my body shift the minute someone says, “Let me tell you a story,” and sometimes I think: why should I believe you? — but then I do, because it’s more pleasurable than not believing. Another word for “madcap” in your question might easily be metaphor, or nightmare, in my opinion.

Girl Factory is set in a frozen yogurt store, which houses young women, suspended in vats of an acidophilus solution in the basement. Hmmm... now what started you thinking about girls in yogurt – where did that image come from?

Where the women came from exactly, I’m not sure. But the yogurt parlor itself only happened on the fifth or sixth attempt to tell a story, and there is something about yogurt that seems to be important to my imagination, maybe something in bacterial action I find inspiring. It was yogurt that allowed the story to begin, not the women. The women in the basement arrived later because I needed something that would cause me to push my limits.

Read the rest of the Q & A.

See January Magazine's Author Snapshot: Jim Krusoe.

The Page 69 Test: Girl Factory.

--Marshal Zeringue