Bryn Chancellor

Bryn Chancellor's new novel is Sycamore.

From her Q&A with Caroline Leavitt:

I always think that writers are haunted to write the book they need to write. Was it this way for you?

Oh, haunted—that’s a lovely way to capture the sense of urgency to write, and yes, that was true for this one. This makes me think of what Joan Didion says in “Why I Write” about the pictures in her mind, the “images that shimmer around the edges.” I know I’m in the clutches of new work when those ghostly shimmers arrive. I wake with them behind my eyes. In the case of Sycamore, it took me awhile to pay attention to them because I had been wrestling with a different novel (one that’s in a drawer now). In my frustration, I started writing what I thought were stories. I wanted to go back to the short form; I missed it for the precision, the intense focus, the unity of effect. I also wanted to just finish something. Then Jess kept popping up, and I was like, Ah, hell, this is a novel! I finally stopped worrying about what it was or would be and let myself be seized by what had been hovering at my door: this place (based on my hometown region in Arizona), these wounded characters, this mystery. I got down the first mess of a draft in one month—and I never write that fast. Partly it was that I was at a...[read on]

Visit Bryn Chancellor's website.

--Marshal Zeringue