Housebreaking (39 page)

What do you find to be the most challenging and rewarding aspects of being a writer?

The answer to both those questions is the same, for me: doing the writing. It's terribly challenging to do it every day. One of the best feelings for me is waking up the next day with the realization that, Oh, I did some work yesterday; I can't wait to see how that looks. If I fail to get any work done on a particular day, it usually seems to me that the day has been irrevocably wasted, even if it happened to be a great day otherwise (say, a day at the beach or slumming in used bookstores). It's a really terrible way to live, in some respects.

What other writers do you feel inspired by?

Inspired by
is a complicated reaction. It eventually gets around to inspiration, but first there is the
wonder
of reading the book—say, off the top of my head,
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, The Great Fire, Underworld
, or anything by those authors or Denis Johnson, Alice Munro, James Salter, William Trevor—and then the feeling of
devastation
that sets in afterward. Devastation in the realization that, Okay, you could try every day for the rest of your life and never write anything even close to that! But, fortunately, I'll muster the troops after a while and say, Well, you still can try, though, right?

What's up next for you? Are you working on any new projects?

As I told my wonderful editor, Millicent Bennett, more than a year ago, “I'm working on four ideas for novels. Two of them are really good, and two of them are terrible ideas.” She said, after a moment, “Why don't you just concentrate on the good ideas?” I had no answer for her then, or now, except to say that the bad ideas could be really fun to write. But, in short, I'm working on a novel, although I'm not sure at the moment which of the four ideas will win out.

Photograph by Lynn Wilcox

DAN POPE
has published short stories in
Crazyhorse, Harvard Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review,
and many other literary journals. He graduated in 2002 from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His first novel,
In the Cherry Tree,
was published by Picador USA. He lives in West Hartford, Connecticut.

ALSO BY DAN POPE

In the Cherry Tree

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2015 by Dan Pope

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition May 2015

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pope, Dan, 1961–

Housebreaking : a novel / Dan Pope. — First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.

pages ; cm

1. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

PS3616.O65H68 2015

813'.6—dc23

2014040481

ISBN 978-1-4767-4590-9
ISBN 978-1-4767-4592-3 (ebook)