Q&A with Erica Wright

  

 

 

Erica Wright is the author of the new novel The Museum of Unusual Occurrence. Her other books include the forthcoming poetry  collection A Buyer's Guide to the Afterlife. She teaches at Bellevue University, and she lives in Knoxville, Tennessee.

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Museum of Unusual Occurrence, and how did you create your character Aly?

 

A: In October 2020, eight months pregnant, I watched a Halloween-adjacent movie and ate a bowl of popcorn every night.

 

I’m not big on gore, but I love Halloween. Tim Burton was in heavy rotation, but I also remember Practical Magic, Hocus Pocus, and Winchester. I decided that I wanted my next novel to have a similar tone, eerie but a little playful.

 

My favorite leisure activity is wandering around a museum, no matter how big or small. Bonus points for the unusual. So I leapt at the chance to create my own imaginary one. While writing, it seemed like a real place, and I wish that I could visit.

Aly sprang to life fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. There she was in the lobby of her Museum of Unusual Occurrence, trying to fix the temperamental chandelier, annoyed but determined.

 

Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?

A: I met E. L. Doctorow once. He taught at my college, and I made an appointment for office hours, deciding that I probably wouldn’t get the chance to meet him any other way. I asked for writing advice, which he graciously provided. I’m a little embarrassed by my boldness now, but what a cool memory.

 

Anyway, I sort of live by his memorable depiction of writing as “like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

 

Q: The novel is set in a town in Florida--how important is setting to you in your writing?

 

A: My books mostly begin with the setting. Perhaps because I don’t know where a story might lead, I need the place and time to ground me. My fictional Wyndale is loosely inspired by a real place in Florida, the so-called “psychic capital of the world.”

 

I grew up in a small town where ghost stories and folklore flourished. That experience helped me think about how the characters might be connected, whether they like it or not.

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

 

A: I hope that readers enjoy the mystery, first and foremost. I didn’t intentionally set out to write about second chances, but that theme emerged at some point, and I wrote toward it.

 

My characters aren’t always kind to themselves, but I want them to be. Perhaps we can all have a little more grace for ourselves and others.

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m feeling lucky to be working on the second book in the series, as yet unnamed. Somebody new comes to Wyndale, a doctor obsessed with the notion of near-death experiences, that is, people who claim to have died and seen glimpses of the afterlife.

 

When he dies (for real), the general consensus is that he was trying to create one of these experiences for himself and things went awry. Aly, and eventually the local police department, suspect otherwise.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: It’s a busy year for me! I also have a collection of poems coming out in July, A Buyer’s Guide to the Afterlife. The poems began as responses to archival images from the American Museum of Natural History and then became more personal meditations on what it means to start a family in a tumultuous world. There’s plenty of fear, but also hope.  

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb