a very real sense of place that worked its way into everything. But as I’ve moved through your other works, you’re shifting geographically, moving slowly eastward. There’s a lot of Chicago. In Stay Awake, Ohio seems to be creeping in. So I wanted to ask you why you’re creeping across the country. Is this just following your own physical trajectory? Did you just feel like you were done with Nebraska? DC: Well, yes, I think that’s right. I’m creeping across the country, writing about places that I’ve lived, in one way or another. I guess I’ve slowed down on the Nebraska stuff because I haven’t lived there in thirty years [laughing]. I feel like I’ve done everything I need to do with that. I’ve lived in Cleveland for a really long time, but I’ve just started writing about it. There’s some Cleveland stuff in Await Your Reply—the twins are from Cleveland—and there’s quite a bit of Cleveland stuff in Stay Awake. And it’s interesting; I think I’m inspired by places that have a sort of rundown or slightly ominous quality, and Cleveland definitely has that. There are some nice parts of Cleveland, but I’m much more interested in the Rust Belt aspect of it. AK: That’s really one of the things I like best about your work. I have that same attraction. I appreciate those same kinds of places. It’s so much more interesting than a city that’s really pretty and clean. DC: My stories tend to tilt in that direction, but I don’t know which came first: whether I like weird places because I write creepy stories, or if I write creepy stories because I like weird places. JD: I read that Stay Awake was written over ten years, and I know when I was taking classes with you at Oberlin, you would touch on this idea that you had to re-imagine yourself as a novelist. That made me wonder if you always saw Stay Awake as a collection, or were you just writing stories in between novels, until you had enough for a book. Either way, what was the process of going from stories to book? DC: I had an idea fairly early on that I wanted to write a collection that would play with the idea of the ghost story, so the stories that ended up being included in this collection were the ones that fit that bill, for the most part. There were some stories that got left out that didn’t really fit the theme. When I was putting it together as a collection, I was really aware of wanting the stories to have a kind of inter-connected feel to them, so some of the revision I did was to create more of that feeling.
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