And\ony Doerr
with the human characters and relationships that are at the heart of any powerful story? Take, for instance, "The Shell Collector." Which came first: research about the deadly cone snail, or the character of the blind collector? How did the two find each other? AD: During a visit to Ohio I found an o ld steel tennis ball can in a closet at my parents' house, and when 1pulled off the cap, this strange, crazily familiar smell rose: the smell of dead snails. Inside the can were tons of shells that I had collected on trips to Florida with my parents. Finding them started firing all these large-scale emotions & memories-stuff I hadn't thought about in a long time. When l was trying to figure out how to write "The Shell Collector," I'd sit at my desk and make notes and finger those old shells and look through my journals from when l was in Lamu and read things Llke papers about cone venom. So the cone snail came first, but with it came lots of memories about travel and littoral zones and moonrises and getting stung by jellyfish and seeing a big, orange moonrise from a treetess island in the Indian Ocean. And the more l read about shells and the formation of them, the more T think the character of the shell collector coalesced as an amalgam of memory and research and imagination, with the tactile pleasure of holding shells and the associations they fired in me. Then l read about Geerat Vermeij, a real-life sightless malacologist who has made all sorts of contributions to his field. And learning about Geerat gave me permission, I think, to make my character sightless. Research as it's understood in other disciplines-looking for informationisn't quite what l do. I'm looking for interesting things, sure, but I'm really looking for subjects, ideas I can fall in love with, scraps of people 1 can build into made-up people, the way palm trees shine in the wind, etc. When I'm working well, when I'm spending hours a day writing something, during much of the rest of the day my subconscious is engaged in it also, and everytl1ing I see- a man eating toast in a Honda at a stoplight, a woman wiping out on the ice outside Macy's-becomes research, becomes material. KS: You recently wrote an essay that you described as an "appreciation" for Alice Munro, and in it, you propose that "a good story becomes part of who we are, perhaps as significant a part of us as our memories." How, as a writer, do you handle your awareness of a story's potential power? What does a writer do with the knowledge that what he writes has the potential to become as real to his readers as their own memories? AD: I'm only happy if I'm living in three parallel worlds: Living my life, and writing something that seems like it might go somewhere, and reading a book that I like. That way, during the course of any day, l am myself, a 84
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