MF: I’d like to start by asking you about your writing process. Are you one of these people who writes at the same time every day, only uses an old typewriter, or hides out in a shed? Since Torch is your first novel, did you find that you approached writing it differently than you approach short stories or essays?

CS: I wish I could hide out in a shed. That kind of deep retreat has been really productive for me—those times when I’ve been away at writers’ residencies and stepped entirely out of my “real life.” But now that I have two children—a boy who just turned two, and a seven-month-old girl—my writing life has to fit around my family life. These days I write when I have a babysitter. I have someone who comes three or four half days a week and I go down to my office in the basement to work. It’s been a challenge to be disciplined enough to use that time for writing because there are so many other things I need to do in those child-free hours.

As for your question about how I approached writing my novel, Torch, versus my short stories or essays, I would say in many ways I approached them in a similar fashion. The sense of discovery is very much a part of my process, regardless of the length or form. A good part of the story comes as I am writing. I don’t plot things out, even in my essays. I just sit down and write and hope that something good comes of it.

Having said that, writing a novel is so different from writing stories and essays in many ways and it took my writing a novel to understand what those differences were, besides the obvious. I was well into Torch before I was able to write chapters that really were chapters instead of short stories. I had to trust the form, to believe that just because I didn’t pack everything there was to know about a particular character in each chapter that it didn’t mean it wouldn’t come in later. With a novel, you have to keep so many more balls in the air than in a short story, and you have to figure out where to let each of those balls finally land. In a novel you have to be more expansive in terms of plot and character and setting, which is both a luxury and a challenge.

But the most important lesson for me had to do with plot. When I was about halfway into writing Torch, I was struck by the realization that things had to happen. In the short stories I’d written before then, I hadn’t thought too much about plot. It was enough that a young woman was conflicted about her boyfriend or that a family pulled together in the face of economic poverty. In Torch, a young mother dies of cancer, leaving her two children and husband grief-stricken. There’s no question that Torch is a character-driven, literary novel and that the most important things that happen in the book are internal, but I also needed to get those characters moving around and doing things. You can get away with having your characters sitting around in rooms being sad for twenty-five pages, but not for four hundred.

MF: When you were twenty-two, your mother was unexpectedly diagnosed with cancer and died a few weeks later, and you have written some powerful essays about how that divided your life into a before and after. Originally with Torch I believe you were thinking of writing something that was autobiographical, as opposed to strictly fiction. Even though Torch has its roots in that period of your life, at what point did it morph into fiction and how do you think the story benefited from being turned into a novel?

CS: I always knew Torch would be fiction, though I thought it would be more autobiographical than it is. I drew upon my experiences and memory to create the main premise of the story, but the characters and the world they inhabit is one I imagined and invented. The more I wrote the less autobiographical it became because my allegiance wasn’t to the actual truth, but to the story itself. I love memoir and I have written several personal essays, but fiction is my first love. I love how liberating fiction is: you can write whatever you want to write. As a writer I am less interested in binding myself to the truth as I remember it than I am to the truth as I can most fully render it.

MF: Teresa hosts a radio show, Modern Pioneers, which is a sort of bohemian lifestyle program in which she talks about rural life, her family, and gives advice. She has a signoff line—Work Hard. Do Good. Be Incredible—that is repeated several times in the book. In some ways, that gives her an extra voice in the novel. We hear her speaking before her death. Characters remember things she told them. And, she speaks after she’s dead in these tapes that are still played on the air. Throughout the book, we hear her voice on these three different levels, which makes her a more vivid character. How did you come up with the idea of giving Teresa a radio show?

CS: Like Claire and Joshua in Torch, I spent a good deal of my adolescence living without electricity, which meant without a television. What we had instead was a radio that my stepfather hooked up to a car battery. We could get a public station from Grand Rapids, Minnesota, much like the one I’ve written about in Torch, full of programs hosted by locals who essentially made it up as they went along. When I got older and moved away from home, I spent time in a number of small towns across the United States—in New Mexico, Wyoming, and Massachusetts, to name a few—and in each of those places the radio served as the same kind of lifeline, the same quirky, intelligent, endearing voice of, by, and for the community. Those radio stations are a real and important part of life in much of rural and small town America, and so it seemed only right that that reality be reflected in my novel.

In addition to that, I thought that being a host of such a show was a perfect fit for the character of Teresa. It allowed me to reveal an aspect of her personality to the reader in a rather organic way and also to convey the fact that Teresa was not just a member of this family, but also a member of this community. Anyone who has ever listened much to radio knows that there is a way that we feel connected to those familiar voices on the radio. They become something like companions to us, even if we’ve never met the person behind the voice. I wanted Teresa to work that same kind of mystery and magic on her listeners in Torch, to belong to her community more powerfully than an ordinary citizen would and, more importantly, to allow those who loved her most—her husband, Bruce, and her children, Claire and Joshua—to experience the pain and the joy of hearing her voice after she was dead.

MF: At one point in the novel, Claire has the realization that grief is not process, but a world unto itself, a world that is different for each person. She will live with her grief in a way that is much different from Joshua or Bruce. I thought this was a fascinating point for two reasons. The first is because in America we have this odd contradiction. We like to think of everyone as an individual, yet on some level, popular culture demands everybody experience things in the same way. So, there are these theories out there about grief and how people are supposed to process grief, which, in many cases has little bearing on reality. The second has to with characterization. In Torch, you create these very sympathetic characters, who in many ways, confound the reader because they don’t necessarily make the novelistic choices a reader expects from people who have just lost a wife and a mother. So, at the end, the reader is left without the cathartic event we often expect from fiction, but with an ending that seems more real. So, I guess this is a long preface to the following question: In creating Bruce, Claire, and Joshua, did you consciously set out to confront popular notions of what grief should be?

CS: Yes and no. In many ways, the only thing I consciously set out to do was to write a novel. There were certainly no issues I wanted to intentionally take up or points I wanted to make. I really did just want to tell a good story about a family during a time of great loss. My characters are complicated and contradictory and unexpected because that’s how we humans are. Their stories don’t culminate in cathartic events because our lives don’t. Catharsis is part of grief, but only one part, and the movement toward catharsis is not linear, but rather circular, in my own experience.

MF: How did you come up with the title? The word torch can have many meanings and several of those could be metaphors for the novel.

CS: I thought of myself as something of a torch singer as I wrote the novel: one who sings a song of love and loss long after the object of love has disappeared.

Torch is a love song to my mother. Also, I like how the word torch is both destructive and creative. To torch something is to obliterate it, but also a torch sheds light. The word comes from the words torture or torment because the first torches were tree branches that were twisted (or tortured) into the shape of a torch. Likewise, Bruce and Claire and Joshua are tortured by their love for Teresa.

MF: Torch has received wonderful reviews, and you recently completely a book tour. So much of writing takes places in a solitary environment that it can be hard to gauge what will happen when your story is released into the world. What was it like to read the reviews and interact with people on the tour? What were some of the responses to the book that surprised you? I know that part of your tour took you to Minnesota to places such as Minneapolis and Duluth that are settings in Torch. What was it like to go back to the places you grew up and read to people, some of whom may have known you then?

CS: It was wonderful when Torch finally came into the world. For so long it belonged only to me and the few people who’d read the book in manuscript form, so I was excited and scared and relieved when it was finally for sale in actual bookstores. I’ve handled the reviews better than I thought I would. Before the book was published I feared that I would get really stressed out whenever I knew a review was pending, but I haven’t. It helps that the reviews have been very positive, but mostly I think it’s that I’m just grateful that people are reading it and writing about it. The most satisfying thing has been to hear from readers. So many people from all walks of life have reached out to tell me that they loved my book—men, women, eighteen year olds and eighty year olds, people who have experienced the death of a family member, people who haven’t, people who picked up the book thinking they’d love it and other people who read it even though they first thought it wasn’t their type of book. All those people! That’s what makes me most humble and grateful and happy and proud all at once. To think that I’ve managed to tell a story that meant something to all those people.

My readings in Minnesota and Wisconsin were amazing. The audiences at those events were packed full of people I hadn’t seen for ages. It was incredibly emotional at times, to see all those faces in the audience, especially the faces of people who knew my mother and who knew me when I was a teenager, people from the county where I grew up, which I fictionalized in Torch. I was a bit nervous to know whether they thought I’d gotten it right. Thank goodness they all agreed that I had.