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183 Patricia Henley Patricia Henley is the author of two novels and four short story collections. She grew up in southern Indiana, but she left the Midwest in 1964 and did not return until she came home to teach at Purdue University in 1987. A graduate of the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University, her first novel, Hummingbird House, was nominated for the National Book Award, the New Yorker Fiction Prize, and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. When she’s not writing, she cooks, visits her children, plays with her cats, and walks the country roads and paths of whatever continent she finds herself on. She lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. Friday Night at Silver Star, 1986 (stories); The Secret of Cartwheels, 1992 (stories); Back Roads, 1996 (stories); Hummingbird House, 1999; Worship of the Common Heart, 2000 (stories); In the River Sweet, 2002 You published three collections of short stories before publishing your first novel, Hummingbird House. How did you make the transition from short fiction to the novel? When I first started writing fiction in 1979, I started a novel. Some of the characters that were in my early short stories were in that novel. That was my first effort at fiction writing. It wasn’t working. I didn’t have a sense of what I was doing. So I turned that novel into stories. Then I wrote the second collection. I didn’t really have the idea of a novel in my mind at all until I went to Guatemala. So the trip to Guatemala came first, before the idea that you would like to write about that place. I went with a friend in 1989. I had always been interested in indigenous people, the fate of indigenous people, and I followed what was going on there from afar. I had no idea how it would affect my writing, but I was 184 the INtervIewS willing to find out. When I went down there, it just seemed like material that begged to be a novel. So I took it on. Was there anything in particular that struck you that way, or just the general experience? I felt that somebody reading a short story about that could ignore the historical context, but if you write a novel, hundreds of pages, no one could ignore it. It seemed like really big issues kept coming up. The lives of women and children in wartime, religion. I thought, “This has to be a novel,” though I still had no idea what I was doing. One of the hardest technical things I dealt with was switching from writing a tidy, ten-totwenty -page piece that’s finished, to writing chapters, where you want just the opposite. You want a book. You want something that’s going to keep the reader reading. Short story writers are used to exposition, conflict, closure , and I found myself doing that a lot with the chapters. I think that’s one of the hardest things for short story writers to get over. Yes, there’s a seamlessness to a good novel. It’s an alternate reality in a way a short story can’t be. You live in it for a while. You want it to feel that way. I think that’s the naive, childlike reader in us. We like to be deeply engaged. We want to have that feeling that we can’t put it down. It’s kind of old fashioned, I guess. But I wanted that sustained tension throughout. So that’s one of the difficulties — and then just sustaining the energy for the project, the mental and emotional and physical energy. My life as a short story writer went like this: I would write a draft in maybe a week or ten days, let it sit maybe for a week or ten days, revise it for a couple of weeks. In a month or six weeks, I would have a story. Maybe I would go back to it in another month or so, but I could have a sense of completion and take some time off. Live my life. Writing a novel requires so much more letting go of the rest of your life. Another transition comes to mind: plotting, of course. I came to realize that short stories are much more like poems than they are like novels. Plotting perplexed me for a long time. Now that I feel I’ve learned a little bit about my own way of plotting...

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