“Family Secrets” by Susan Knox appeared in Issue 44 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about this story.
Family Secrets grew out of a conversation with a good friend in the late 1990’s. She told me about an intervention with her son regarding his alcoholism. Years later, I started writing a story using an intervention as the starting point and it grew, as stories sometimes do, almost on it’s own.
What was the most difficult part in writing this story?
While I spent a lot of time revising, this piece seemed to spin out on its own.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
I discovered Maggie O’Farrell’s novels this past year. She’s a master of the metaphor and I particularly love her historic fiction, especially The Marriage Portrait.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Lauren Groff. I believe I’ve read all her fiction and I recently read her amazing profile of the singer/songwriter, Florence Welch, in T Magazine. I’d like to discuss her process in preparing to write the profile.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I’m putting together a collection of my nonfiction. I expect it will take quite a while.
Our thanks to Susan for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “Family Secrets” here.
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Susan Knox’s stories and essays have appeared in Barely South Review, CALYX, Cleaver, The MacGuffin, Matador Review, Sequestrum, Still Point Arts, Zone 3, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net. She and her husband live in Seattle, near Pike Place Market where she shops most days for the evening meal.