In your story “Honest IslandA man named Craint finds himself living in a hotel on an island whose language he does not speak. He has no memory of how he got there or his life before this visit. How did the story come together for you? Did you start with this premise and then look for an explanation for it, or did you have a full understanding of the world and rules of the story before you started writing?

I wrote this story just a few months ago and now I’m having trouble remembering how it came together. Maybe it’s more truly autobiographical than I thought.

I think I had the setting in mind first and foremost, as the island was inspired by a real place I visited. I dreamed of a stranger who did not remember when and why he came to the island. I did the rest while writing the story. (Unlike its geography, the human world is—hopefully clear—completely fictitious.)

When I have a concept for a story, part of the joy of writing is figuring out what appeals to me about the conceit, why the situation makes me feel pregnant. This often means identifying points where the idea connects to my emotional life or experience of the world. At the end of Donald Barthelme’s story “BalloonThe narrator explains that the huge, mysterious balloon hovering over the city “was a spontaneous autobiographical revelation.” I feel like there’s something similar going on with “Honest Island.”

The story offers a very specific geography for the island and the region surrounding it. Why are the details of the place so clear when there is a bigger question of what it is, where it is? if Is that so? Is it up to the reader to decide?

The hero Craint is somewhat incomprehensible and unknown to himself. It’s a bit like an uninked sketch. Much of how we know him and understand his situation is through his interaction with the world around him: Budger, the other main character, and the island itself. In fact, I think it would be right to say that the island is the third main character in the story.

There is probably no need to state that our life, our language, our character emerge from the confrontation between self and environment. This is even more evident for young children, who do not typically experience the world through a metalanguage of explanations and abstractions. Their encounters with the world are not “pre-processed,” so to speak. Having lost his memory, and with it some of this explanatory mediation, Craint shares something with a child negotiating the world for the first time. As I wrote, I was struck by the extent to which the simple words we use to describe human actions or activities presuppose the environment we inhabit: “walk,” “climb,” “swim,” “breathe.” Our words take into account the surrounding world, the impossibility of isolating the individual.

Beyond this, the story acknowledges the blurred boundary between physical reality and internal or emotional reality. The atmosphere of the island—warm, still, glassy, ​​bright—reflects Craint’s mood, his confusion, bewilderment, blindness, and apathy. Writers are warned to steer clear of the “pathetic fallacy” to avoid placing the emotional burden of character or story on nature, but I don’t know who made these rules or by what authority they felt entitled to enforce them. Literature has been woefully misguided since its inception, and I think this simply reflects, naturally and organically, the fact that it is not a scientific document but a space in which to meditate on the intersection of inside and outside, mind and world.

You, the author, know what’s going on in “Honest Island” and have been dropping hints throughout the story, but do you want us to see a bigger picture?

I wouldn’t say A. The bigger picture is singular, but I hope readers will come up with their own ideas about what’s going on. I was pretty careful about how much precise information I should provide in terms of tips and tricks. I hope I have given enough information to make speculation fruitful without the need for a ultimately reductive interpretation.

I’m afraid I’ve said this before, but I don’t believe writers have the final say or even the sole authority in determining what their stories are about. Many writings proceed by intuition rather than “encoding” a meaning for readers to decipher. So fiction should doIn my opinion, it somewhat overshadows the author’s understanding of this subject. And while I’m all for people sharing their interpretations of stories, I think writers need to tread carefully when it comes to their own work: their words carry too much weight and risk crowding out other ideas and distorting the essential open-endedness of art.

You recently drew my attention to an answer given by Haruki Murakami. Q&A. With you, this summed up my feelings perfectly. After saying that the reader must find his own answer to his story, he writes: “As the author, of course, I have an interpretation, but it is not necessarily Right One. “This is nothing more than a hypothesis.”

In the story, we learn that Craint and then a second man, Budger, went to the island willingly and were aware in advance that they would lose their memories of their previous lives. Why does Craint, who has been forewarned and has chosen this form of forgetfulness, resist it so much?

We all have regrets in life, making what we thought were good decisions and then wondering if we made the right choice or if following our desires actually helped our happiness. I think it’s natural for Craint to feel uncertain, unsure, and torn, given the extreme consequences of the choice he’s made. The question is specifically why he can’t let go of the past or come to terms with his own decision, and I’m not sure the story answers that, just that it happens occasionally – as does the governor who runs the island. The fact that this happens to Craint is what makes him the hero of the story. I don’t think Budger can replace him because he’s unlikely to give it a second thought. But even on that I could be wrong. Maybe there’s more to Budger than I see.

Craint is not a common name; I don’t actually think it’s a name. It’s a French word meaning “fear” (and at one point in the story we discover that Craint’s possible family members bear French names). Have you chosen the name of this resonance? And although Budger clearly speaks the same language as Craint, he speaks it with an intonation and idioms that are distinctly British. Should we accept these names as clues to the mystery of the story?