I suppose it's lucky that you're like him in that way, because as a writer you specialize in creepy scenarios. Another writer, Shelley Jackson, who incidentally did the cover art for my book, read the story when it was published and said, "I saw that! I saw that in the museum!" But by that time she was living in California, and she couldn't really describe to me where in the museum she had seen it.ĭo a lot of things like that happen to you?Īnother writer I interviewed recently said that the reason his fiction is full of disturbing, dark things is because by temperament he's basically very contented and optimistic. Yes, especially because I went back later to look for the display case, and I never found it again. So the story was inspired by a strange experience? There was a display case with a description for the hat, but there was no hat in it. There's a museum called the Peabody Museum. So if I asked you: What isthe specialist's hat. I'll know when it's not the story that I meant to write, but if people ask me questions, like, "What exactly happened here?" my brain will shut down and I'll say, "I don't know!" I can't put this together." So I'll write around the ghost story, vaguely sort of a ghost story, but not really. With a story like that, or with the story "The Girl Detective," I'll start out thinking, "I'll write a ghost story" or "I'll write a detective story." Then I'll begin and think, "I can't do this. I'm wondering if when you write a story like that, in which the reader doesn't quite know what's happening, is there a lot that you, the writer, know but that you're not telling us? Or do you prefer to not even know yourself? In "The Specialist's Hat," for example, it's not always crystal clear what's going on, but there are a lot of intimations, and the intimations are all pretty disturbing. One striking thing about your stories is their powerful atmosphere. Link dropped by Salon's New York offices to talk about "Stranger Things Happen," her new story collection, the imperfection of romance and the reason why so many stories feature absent mothers. Books have been a constant in her peripatetic life, from studying literature to working in bookstores and for publishers and, of course, writing. moving every five years or so, settling for the moment in Brooklyn, N.Y. (Well, maybe once - see below.) The 32-year-old daughter of a pastor turned psychologist, Link has lived in an assortment of American cities - Philadelphia, Miami, Boston, Greensboro, N.C. Despite the "stranger things" that happen in her stories, Kelly Link maintains that uncanny events don't take place in her real life.
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