Q&A with Melissa Payne

  

 

 

Melissa Payne is the author of the new novel In This Life or Another. Her other books include Memories in the Drift. She lives in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write In This Life or Another, and how did you create your character Rusty?

 

A: I love stories that live in the liminal spaces between what we know and what we don’t. For Rusty, this means questioning whether his 60 years have made a difference or if he’s squandered his time by doing nothing of significance.

 

When he takes a bullet to save the people of a small Colorado diner, Rusty finds himself in an in-between place where he has the chance to see what his life might have been like if he’d only done more.

 

The character of Rusty developed partially from a vision I had of a man eating out every single night of the week. I wondered why he was always alone and what got him to this point in life. Did someone wait for him at home? Did he pine for something he couldn’t have? Was he content or unhappy or desperate for a change?

 

Sometimes it only takes an image to spark all the questions we need to create a story. 

 

Q: We’ve talked about setting in our previous interviews--how would you describe the setting in this new novel?

 

A: Like many of my novels, In This Life or Another is set in a small Colorado mountain town. There’s just something about the landscape here that inspires me – whether it’s from the steadiness of the mountain horizons, the capriciousness of our weather, or the variety of our small towns that welcomes those who love the land, the dreamers, the workers, and anyone looking for an escape.

 

It’s a symbiotic partner to a story that explores the human condition, because the other setting in this novel is the internal landscape of our hearts and minds. The unexplored places where we hide our deepest fears and uncertainties. The place where we all must stand alone at some point or another.

 

I enjoyed the process of watching Rusty navigate this new landscape and ultimately have to face his own truth, especially against the backdrop of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range.

 

Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: In the in-between, Rusty looks back on his life and also experiences firsthand the life he might have lived if he’d made different choices. Rusty wonders if this other life would have been easier or less painful or more fulfilling. But there are similarities between the two lives and some events that happen in both regardless of his choices.

 

The title is a direct quote from his mother, who says it in an effort to explain to Rusty that some things, like losing a loved one, grief, and regret, are a fact of life that happen to all of us – in one life or another.  

 

Q: What was it like to write about a character caught between life and death?

 

A: It was fascinating to explore this topic from the viewpoint of a fictional character. These are hard questions for all of us, and the truth is, until we get there, none of us truly knows what happens after we die, and that can be unsettling and even frightening.

 

So to create a world for this character where he explores what might be available to him after death was an intense exploration of my own hopes and fears and insecurities.

 

It was at times fun to write and at other times reassuring to imagine how our purpose and existence, small or large, might affect people we love and even those we don’t know very well. And at times, it even made me take stock of my own life. 

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m so excited about my next book! First, because it’s set in the very real college town of Athens, Ohio, in 1998, which happens to also be around the time I was a student there. So it’s an exploration of my own memory and of a place I called home for six very formative years.

 

While I was in graduate school, my program had offices in what had once been known as the Athens Insane Asylum. Actually, it’s had many, many names, but after it closed its doors, the university purchased it with plans to renovate the historic buildings and put them to new use.

 

It’s now known as The Ridges, and it has always fascinated me both for the eerie beauty of its buildings, the beautiful land that surrounds it, and for its long, complicated history and the many, many untold stories of the patients who were treated there.

 

This new story is about a woman who’s hurt everyone she loves and has to learn how to forgive herself and heal a decades-old family mystery when she sets out on a path to give the dead of the Ridges a chance to tell their stories.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Melissa Payne.