[Ending] is partly drawn from a desire to shock the audience, to brutally de-romanticize what many Americans think is happening overseas. And partly drawn from my own childhood: violence and a loss of innocence. But keep in mind that, as a writer, I'm both the criminal and the victim. I'm not trying to get out of anything easy.

An initial impulse of mine was to portray the way in which a city is impacted by war. But this is vague, no? After all, how do you actually have an entire city - or country, for that matter - be a character a reader can follow? One way is by making it smaller and personalizing it, by writing specifically about the citizens and the way they contend with the reality, even minutiae, especially minutiae, of their lives.

Since most of the action of the war actually happens off the page (offstage), I wanted to give the characters something they had to contend with on a daily basis, some sort of obstacle. Weather seemed to be the one great equalizer regardless of your station in life - when it snows, everyone is inconvenienced to a certain degree. Plus it's tactile, weather, it affects the skin.

The thematic links came a little later, after I noticed I was gravitating towards certain elements - war, city, weather. So it wasn't all planned out from the start, it came out of the process.

But it's hard for me to pinpoint where all my characters and dialogue come from - imagination or real life. My memoir, of course, was all about my past, and many of the short stories cleave very closely to my life, but the more stories I wrote in the collection, the more that seemed to be invented, but who knows... I think I'm writing about a young woman with acne who shoplifts, but I'm really writing about myself.

I don't work with an outline, except a vague one in my head, a general idea of character, place, arc... I'm like a composer with a symphony in their head: I can hear the music, I just have to figure out how to put it down on paper. But I don't always know where my stories are going when I begin.

Love and happiness inextricably combined? I wanted love stories to coincide with war stories, I wanted hope for my characters, I wanted a sense of a future. So do they. So does the reader. But perhaps I shouldn't speak for everyone when I say that love and happiness are interdependent. In my own experience, happiness came with love. Specifically, my wife. That's when my own apathy and stasis ended for good.