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Leah De Forest is the author of the new novel Any Kind of Known Tomorrow. She is an editor at Bloom Literary, and she lives in Boston.
Q: What inspired you to write Any Kind of Known Tomorrow, and how did you create your cast of characters?
A: The book began with a realization: teenagers pulling away from parents is developmentally necessary, and hard. Both parent and child are grieving, in different ways.
At the same time, I was thinking a lot about displacement and belonging. Who gets to belong where, and why? In the very early drafts, I was thinking about that on an international scale (some of the characters were refugees). As the book evolved, the story became centered on Brooklyn, New York.
While dealing with the growing-away of her own daughter, Hadley Parris decides to take in a teenager—a situation I was interested in exploring because I was a ward of the State as a teen.
In the draft I finished in 2019, Hadley was struggling with a novel disease and the threat of a pandemic; when 2020 happened, I changed course to account for real-world events.
The characters are so real to me now that it’s hard to recall exactly how I created them! Iteratively is probably the best description. In their earliest stages they developed out of my interests/obsessions: mother-daughter relationships, questions of belonging, the endless mystery I see in how we each interact with the wider world.
As each character took shape, I thought a lot about pressure points: given the situation, what kind of character trait might create the most interesting problems?
And I always went back to the novelist Margot Livesey’s idea of character attitude: how does this character see themselves and their world? Once I had a solid handle on that, I knew I had a fleshed-out character.
Q: As you noted, the novel is set in New York City in 2020--how important is setting to you in your writing?
A: It’s hugely important. Reading offers the gift of meeting another mind in the quiet of the page.
To me, a big part of the pleasure of that is inhabiting another time and place—whether it’s a distant fantasy world, a historical time period, a culture I’ve never personally experienced, or a fictional version of last week. In this novel, of course, the setting informs some of the story’s central tension.
Q: The author Sarah Stone called the book a “moving account of survival and reinvention that shows both the costs and the unexpected gifts of living in an increasingly fragile world.” What do you think of that description?
A: To have someone as thoughtful and intelligent as Sarah Stone describe my work in that way? I think it’s marvelous, and I’m deeply grateful.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: The title comes from a line in the novel; until quite late in the drafting process, the book had a different, working title.
To me, the title signifies the kind of gateway space we all occupy in any moment: we awaken every day having made reasonable assumptions about what’s on the horizon, and move through the world, again quite reasonably, assuming ordinary things will occur. Mostly they do. But not always. To me, that’s one of the great challenges of being alive.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: A new novel. I love big, baggy social novels with a love relationship at the center. That’s my vision for this new project.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I publish a craft newsletter, The Point of View Playbook, on Substack—it’s a resource for writers, a rolling list of POV examples and author interviews that I hope will be useful now, and as it continues to grow. So if you’re a writer working with POV (aren’t we all?), please check that out.
I’m also a senior editor at Bloom Literary, an online magazine that spotlights writers who published their first major work over the age of 40. We also publish original fiction and poetry. More about these and other endeavors at www.leahdeforest.net.
Thank you, Deborah, for all you’re doing to spotlight books and writers!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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