My dad has always had a vast range of interests so I imagine I picked up from him the idea that, say, being an English professor with a specialty in Canadian lit, as he was, need not define or limit one’s tastes or interests. My dad has extremely omnivorous cultural appetites—with regard to movies he often tells me “I’ll see anything,” and he will. He also has an annoyingly vast knowledge of history, politics, social issues; I’ve yet to encounter a subject on which he cannot discourse with some level of informed reason. He loves to debate, and though I never got that good at sparring with him I was intrigued by the skill involved in adopting a position, if only for argument’s sake, and defending it persuasively. He is so good on the spot; I am better at retiring to my corner and fulminating.

My sense is the further a writer allows her interests to take her, the more connected and contextualized seemingly disparate subject matter reveals itself to be. For me pursuing a relative array of interests also helped define a larger set of concerns. It was Middlemarch, of all things, and its particular construction of social realism, that helped me find a way to talk about social realism as it is taking shape on the Internet. I’d like to think it’s the one area where commitment issues work in a person’s favor.

AK: What other works would you say shaped or instigated or influenced your writing?

MO: Yeah, there’s a kind of paradox in the idea that the further you wander, the more focused your concerns become. The other day I met with a young woman, an aspiring writer, whose ultimate and very sincere question—How do I become a writer?—was of course impossible to answer over iced tea. Still I felt like I had let her down, and that night thought of how long and unlikely the writing road is. I wished I had told her that it’s not even clear you’re on the road until you’re at least a third of the way down. It’s only when you’ve got some ground both behind and in front of you that things start to make a little more sense.