John Brown Spiers

John Brown Spiers: Your essays are layered almost impossibly well. Not only are they never about just one thing (or even just a couple of things), they very rarely meander, or “essay,” in the sense of a journey without a firm destination or even a firm path. Similarly, you admit from the outset of “Still […]

John Brown Spiers: From the outset of “Secret Information,” you inform us that you’ve written the essay because “I feel obligated to relate something about that ominous place I had been taken to under the Nevada desert, and the abyss I peered into.” And, near the end, you realize that the scientist who serves as […]

John Brown Spiers: “Dead Last is a Kind of Second Place,” your piece in the Winter 2013 issue of The Georgia Review, is excerpted from your forthcoming memoir A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip. After having read “Dead Last,” which follows the seventh-grade Kevin exclusively, I’m gathering that this book differs from your others in […]

John Brown Spiers: To what extent do you think a novel needs to be dependent upon plot? You’ve spoken of what you perceived to be your own deficiencies with plot while writing Strange As This Weather Has Been, but that novel seems to be driven as much by event—driven successfully—as it is by character and […]

John Brown Spiers: An early paragraph in “Shadow Animals” describes your reaction to your father laying sand on a wild-game trail on your new property in northwest Montana. He does this to capture hoofprints and determine what sort of wildlife lives in the woods, but as he furrows the sand with a rake, you imagine […]