Katie Jean Shinkle is the author of The Arson People (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2015) as well as Our Prayers After the Fire (Blue Square Press, 2014). She serves as Associate Editor of Denver Quarterly.
Her novel, The Arson People, appeared in Issue Seventy of The Collagist.
Here, she answers questions in the form of excerpts from The Arson People.
What is writing like?
“I have warrants so no one is leaving.”
What isn’t writing like?
It is the final weeks of July, she is so happy to have this month almost over. She hates July. She wants everything to go back to normal, to go back to school in the fall, to forget all of this has ever happened.
When you do it, why?
Seventeen acres of dark underdeveloped trees and grass are on fire.
When you don’t, why?
But her crush had long since not been her crush, her parents moved, and now the house is empty save for random tenants her long time ago crush’s parents allow to live there.