My first trip to New York City, where I live now, was on a drama class trip when I was sixteen. After university, like a lot of people, I got very into solo travel, and I remember thinking whatever I had to do for a full-time salary would be okay for a few years if it helped me travel. My vacations tended to be scouting expeditions. At that point there developed a clearer connection between travel and storytelling, and I would say I wrote because I was traveling, even if I didn’t always know why. The point of a trip would often be to figure out why I made the trip. And more and more a big part of it seemed not to be just a desire for new experiences but a desire to tell a story. Looking back I appear a little thick to myself—it took me so long to make the most obvious connection!

AK: Do, or did, you then also recognize running as a means of distraction? In “Ways of Escape” you say “When I try to think what started me running, I remember first the urge to swallow time. There seemed to be, as I recall, too much of it in a given day.” Why do you think people often realize a surplus of time when at their most frustrated?

MO: A friend texted me recently, asking what normal people do on Saturdays. This person, if he doesn’t have a creative project to throw all of his energies into, is at a profound loss as to what to do with himself. For a period of my life that’s how I felt all the time. So running became, in the immediate sense, something to do, but it was also a way of avoiding the larger question of what I should be doing. I got too much out of running to say it was purely a distraction, it was more purely an escape. But yes I do remember feeling overwhelmed by time, and wanting to somehow outrun the massive shadow it seemed to cast over me.