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103 Peter Cameron Peter Cameron is the author of five novels and three collections of short stories. He was born in Pompton Plains, New Jersey, and grew up there and in London, England. A graduate of Hamilton College in New York State, he sold his first short story to the New Yorker in 1983, and published ten more stories in that magazine during the next few years. Beginning in 1990, Cameron stopped writing short fiction and turned his attention toward novels. He has taught writing at Oberlin College, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Yale University, and worked for Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a legal organization that protects and extends the civil rights of gay men, lesbians, and people with HIV/AIDS. Currently, he works for the Trust for Public Land. He lives in New York City. One Way or Another, 1986 (stories); Leap Year, 1990; Far-flung, 1991 (stories); The Weekend, 1994; The Half You Don’t Know: Selected Stories, 1997; Andorra, 1997; The City of Your Final Destination, 2002; Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, 2007 Would you talk first about how books gather for you? What is the process by which book ideas appear, develop, and evolve in your mind? I don’t understand the process very well. It seems mysterious and also very much beyond my control. I often go years in between books simply because I don’t have an idea for one. A very gradual accumulation happens during those periods, ideas appear and develop. The ideas that I originally had for both Andorra and The City of Your Final Destination were more intellectually and architecturally ambitious than the books turned out to be. Andorra was going to be a novel within a novel about this man participating in a prisoner-mentor writing program, corresponding with a prisoner who was writing a novel. You’d see the mentor’s life and the scenes around him, and then you’d see the correspondence between them 104 the INtervIewS and the chapters of the novel the prisoner was writing. I worked on it that way for a year or two and it was sort of nowhere until I realized that the only part I really liked was the novel the prisoner was writing. So I jettisoned the frame. I conceived The City of Your Final Destination as a book that would explore the nature of biography. You would see scenes from the lives of Gund [the subject of the biography] and the people around him. Omar would come and you would hear how they would talk about their lives. Then there would be scenes from Omar’s subsequent biography [of Gund]. It was about looking at how life gets lived, how it gets remembered, and how it gets recorded. Again, I worked quite a while and realized what really interested me was the very human story of the people there. So I reformulated the book as a much simpler story. It seems to me that to get an idea I have to conceive of a book more ambitiously than it turns out to be. Then in process it gets simplified and scaled down. Part of the reason might be that there’s always pressure to write a big book, a more complex book—and I’m not that kind of writer. I think I’ll always write pretty conventional, not terribly ambitious books in terms of scope. But I think I feel that pressure and I conceive of these ideas that could potentially turn into a big book. And they don’t. Your style, your use of language is so careful and beautiful. Are you a slow writer? I am a slow writer. It’s interesting. The idea for Someday This Pain Will Be Useful just came. I knew it was going to be a small book that would take place over a few days. I thought, since that was so clear to me, it ought to be a fairly quick book to write. But no. My original idea for the book was not so different from the book it ended up being, but it took me just as long. It just takes me a long time to write a book. I keep going back and rewriting what I’ve done before I go forward, so that what’s there seems very solid, in as good a state as I can get it. So you don’t have to revise much at the...

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