Where (or how) does a short story begin for you?

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Stories often begin with a detail from my real life that feels contradictory or that has disturbed me. The stories in The Good Eye aren’t autobiographical, but they’re filled with objects, meals, and places that I’ve experienced. For example: the book opens with some rats, a real estate agent, and a psychic who communicates with animals. I made up the human characters, but the rats were my rats. They lived in the backyard of my Brooklyn apartment one summer and I felt conflicted about them. Rats are intelligent and social – they cuddle and giggle together – but on the other hand, they can get into your apartment through a hole the size of a quarter. Another example is from the story “Linear A,” in which there’s a man who starts hitting a woman on the street because he believes she’s stolen his wallet. I saw a tourist do this in Florence when I was eighteen. That memory has troubled me ever since and it became the germ of this story.

I’d love to hear about your writing process for The Good Eye. Was there a particular place or time of day that you enjoyed writing from? What do you surround yourself with while you write?

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I wrote the stories in The Good Eye over a number of years. At the beginning I thought I needed a quiet room, a clean desk, a view out a window, and a full pot of coffee to get started. After having a child, however, I became way less fussy: turns out it’s equally possible for me to write for a couple of free minutes surrounded by LEGO and laundry. That said, I use gridded notebooks – I hate lined paper – and I write my first drafts longhand. When possible, I also like to write before going to sleep. My theory is that being a little tired dulls the conscious thinking part of my mind, so the writing part has more space. I’m not a morning person, so it’s also helpful to have some handwritten notebook pages to give me a running start after I wake up. When I transcribe my text onto the computer, I begin cutting and rewriting. That’s generally how these stories took shape.

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Can you share how your love of literature began? What are your earliest memories of storytelling?

Mine is the kind of family that tells and re-tells stories in conversation – my father in particular had a huge repertoire of tales – and I used to request my favourites (“tell me the one about…”). My parents also read aloud to me every night when I was small. My clearest memories are from summers at our family cabin in the northern Quebec woods. We have no electricity up there, so I remember sitting in the circle of yellow light from an old kerosene lamp, listening to my mother read.

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“I love how precise and sharply defined short stories can be. I enjoy seeing the shape of them while reading, and I like what’s omitted: many stories are slices, leaving much to the reader’s imagination. But good ones feel huge: they expand beyond themselves.” ​

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—Jess Gibson

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What is it about the form of a short story that draws you in—as both reader and writer?

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I love how precise and sharply defined short stories can be. I enjoy seeing the shape of them while reading, and I like what’s omitted: many stories are slices, leaving much to the reader’s imagination. But good ones feel huge: they expand beyond themselves.

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How has your background in art history informed your writing?

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A number of my stories hinge on perception as unstable and mutable: deception, self-deception, misperception, shifts in perspective. Art history also taught me about description: after reading about art, I always end up seeing it differently. Finding the exact words to capture something about the physical world – objects, food, textures – is a way to take readers by the hand.

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Are there any writers (or artists) that you feel yourself giving a nod to as you write?

Maybe in my next book I’ll feel sure-footed enough to give some literary nods. When writing these stories, I tried not to think too much about influence. I did have a lot of art and architecture in the front of my mind though. The title story mentions a Dutch seventeenth century painter called Willem Claesz Heda whose work has a subtle mystery and threat that I’m drawn to. The idea for “Clairvoyance” came from conversations years ago with two artist friends – Amie Siegel and Katarina Burin – who’ve both made work about architecture. So that story is a bit of a nod to them.