What?
I have published poetry and essays, but at heart I am a fiction writer. My first story collection, Voices of the Lost and Found, is a group of gritty, unflinching, largely tragic stories told from the perspectives and in the voices of eleven disparate characters: an urban graffiti artist, a doctoral student who loses his mind while studying literary theory, a teenage boy on an interstate crime spree. I am obsessed with studying people who are unlike me (after all, how interesting are we to ourselves?), and I do this by crawling into the heads of my characters and living there for a while. Soon they will start talking, and I listen closely, and I write. My second book, Ovenbirds and Other Stories, is what I would call Tragic-Lite because the characters connect, or at least they try to. But my latest story collection, What It Might Feel Like to Hope, is, as evidenced by the title, a departure from the gloom into work that is more optimistic. I’m not sure if I’m growing more positive as I age or if I’m crafting in my writing the hope that I so desperately crave in these despairing times.
Why?
I started writing—and reading—when I was very young as an escapist activity. My childhood was not an easy one (ask any writer and they will more often than not have grown up in difficult circumstances), so reading about worlds that were like mine made me feel less alone, and reading about worlds that were much better gave me hope for something more. But creating my own plots and settings allowed me a form of control I never felt at home, and this was a salvation of sorts.
I am self-diagnosed with mild OCD, so organizing plots and resolving conflicts is therapeutic for me; there is great satisfaction in creating order from the chaos in my brain, in seeing the nebulous mass of concepts and feelings coalesce into words neatly printed on a page.
I also love stories that quietly educate me on string theory or the mating proclivities of the Neandertals, so I often introduce a “lesson as background noise” in my work. Since I am interested in so many disparate things, my greatest challenge as a writer has been finding a common thread in the stories I gather into collections.
How?
My fishbowl. Whenever I have an idea for a story when I’m out and about, I jot it down on scrap paper before the concept flees my ever-filling brain. When I get home, I throw the paper into my fishbowl, which is now about half full (and does not contain fish!). When I need a new story I idea I reach in and grab a paper and am immediately taken back to the moment of the idea’s inception, that original spark reanimating me. Where I do not seek inspiration is from people who tell me that they have a great story idea I should write. Most often their vision is unique to them and only they can relay it. Imagine being responsible for someone else’s brilliant plan! It’s like trying to raise their child as they look over your shoulder.
I tend to work on two projects simultaneously, staying with one until I hit a wall and then turning to the other; I have fallen into the trap of not writing at all until I had a breakthrough with a stalled work, and that is no way to be a writer. I am currently finishing a novel and, while writing it, I finished another story collection. I am more energetic in the evening, so my writing hours are late, often between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m.
Bio:
Dorene O’Brien is a Detroit-based creative writing teacher and writer whose stories have won the Red Rock Review Mark Twain Award for Short Fiction, the Nelson Algren Award, the New Millennium Writings Fiction Prize, and the international Bridport Prize. She has won fellowships from the NEA and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been nominated for two Pushcart prizes, has been published in special Kindle editions and has appeared in the Baltimore Review, Madison Review, Best of Carve Magazine, Short Story Review, Southern Humanities Review, the Chicago Tribune, Detroit Noir, Montreal Review, Passages North, and others. Voices of the Lost and Found, her first fiction collection, was a finalist for the Drake Emerging Writer Award and won the USA Best Book Award for Short Fiction. Her fiction chapbook, Ovenbirds and Other Stories, won the Wordrunner Chapbook Contest and was published in 2018. Her second full-length story collection, What It Might Feel Like to Hope, was named first runner-up in the Mary Roberts Rinehart Fiction Prize and will be released in 2019 by Baobab Press. She is currently writing a literary/Sci-Fi hybrid novel.
Links
Website
Twitter
Interview with Baobab Press
Michigan Radio book review
Michigan Daily article
Oakland Press article
Books:
What It Might Feel Like to Hope
Voices of the Lost and Found
Ovenbirds and Other Stories
Linda K. Sienkiewicz is the author of the award-winning novel In the Context of Love, a story about one woman’s need to tell her truth without shame.
2017 New Apple Book Awards Official Selection
2016 Sarton Women’s Fiction Finalist
2016 Eric Hoffer Book Award Finalist
2016 Readers’ Favorite Finalist
2016 USA Book News Best Book Finalist
“…at once a love story, a cautionary tale, and an inspirational journey.” ~ Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of National Book Award Finalist, American Salvage, and critically acclaimed Once Upon a River,and Mothers, Tell Your Daughters
“With tenderness, but without blinking, Linda K. Sienkiewicz turns her eye on the predator-prey savannah of the young and still somehow hopeful.” ~ Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of the #1 NY Times Bestseller, Deep End of the Ocean
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