About the book…
A striking original, deftly humorous collection of stories that considers the quest for truth: how we come to it or alternatively avoid it. A fervently comic debut, The Running Trees leads readers into a series of conversations — through phonelines, acts in a play, and a rewound recording of a police interrogation — to reveal characters in fumbling bouts of brutality, reflection, isolation, and love. Read more >>Interview with Amber McMillan
All Lit Up: When did you decide that you wanted to write a book with so much dialogue?Amber McMillan: I found dialogue to be one part of my writing that needed work, so I set about focusing on it somewhat exclusively. I spent time listening to strangers talk to each other: on the bus, in line at the grocery store, on their phones when we shared the sidewalk for a minute or two… I wanted to get the cadence of natural speech buried deep in my ear canal so I could draw on it to make these fictionalized conversations. ALU: Do we live in the post-over-share world now? Is anything really shocking anymore? Surprising?AM: I think there is, yeah. I think we’re still surprised, maybe even shocked, when we fall in love or have a baby or lose someone. We are no doubt living in a new world in the sense that we have this vast and democratizing platform – the internet – to contend with, but I’m not convinced necessarily that the kind of access it allows for, has in some way created nihilists of us all. ALU: What characters from The Running Trees might you want to revisit later in your career?AM: It hasn’t occurred to me to revisit any of them in some future story, but if I had to revisit one, it’d be one of the cats. ALU: What are some of your fave short story collections? AM: It goes without saying there are many beautiful stories and story collections, many more still that I’ll never read, so having said that, I can think of a few very special books. The Stories of Tobias Wolff, which is actually a collection culled from three previous Wolff collections, but in this case, you get all the greats in one book. The uncategorizable A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt and Something for Everyone by Lisa Moore – what a beauty, my god. Anything by Alice Munro. Obviously.* * *
