Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. 

Today’s guest for the WHAT is Eleanor Lerman, author of The Game Café: Stories of New York City in Covid Time — nine stories of people who live in New York City—or are traveling there—in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

In the height of the covid pandemic, when the television news continually featured stories about “the death” of New York City because people were fleeing, the hospitals were overrun, the business districts were deserted and no one would ever return to offices, etc., etc., I became incensed at the idea that anyone could think New York City was ever going to become a ghost town. To begin with, as a lifelong New Yorker and the daughter of a factory worker, the argument seemed to me to stem from an elitist view of urban life—the people “fleeing” were actually those who had a choice to do so because they had the wealth to own a second home in the suburbs or to simply buy another home in an area where the pandemic was having less of a devastating impact. So, the stories in my collection, The Game Café: Stories of New York City in Covid Time were born from my outrage at the notion that a city built by immigrants, fueled by the work and ingenuity of a diverse population, offering community to people across the gender spectrum, and that provides opportunity to anyone willing to take on the challenges of urban life could be brought down by the coronavirus. Each story in the collection focuses on the lives of different individuals coping with the pandemic in their own way and each, in their own way, is going to find a way not only to live through this dark time but come out on the other side with a new understanding of how deeply integral their relationship to the life of the city is to their own individual life story.

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

There are nine short stories in the collection and each is built around the same concept: how the coronavirus pandemic has affected the life of a particular individual. Some of the characters have lost their jobs, one is living in Los Angeles and decides to drive home to New York, others reassess their relationship to a sibling or an adult child, and some are suffering from long-term illnesses (not Covid-related), but the decisions they make and the experiences they have all stem from how the pandemic is impacting their lives.

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

This is almost always the case, whether I am writing a short story or a novel. Once a character begins to take on substance and develop a voice, he or she usually helps to move the story along in a direction I had not necessarily anticipated. That’s fine because I begin any story with knowing how it will end and as long as I’m moving towards that ending, letting the characters change the plot as we move along is actually helpful. What I have learned about my work is that I trust myself as a writer so no matter how the story changes, I can adapt.

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

I have been telling myself all kinds of stories in my mind since I was a child so there is always something brewing, 

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating? 

It would be unusual for me to find myself in that situation. I am very disciplined about my work, meaning that I don’t wait for inspiration (whatever that means) but rather, sit down at my computer every day intent on working. The stream-of-consciousness thing that goes on in my mind all the time just pushes one idea forward from that long, rolling river of ideas and that becomes the one I focus on.

I have 6 cats and a Dalmatian (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting? 

My office is an old purple couch and I sit on one end with a laptop. For over twenty years, there has been one or another small dog snoozing away on the other end. The day after my previous, much-loved dog passed away, I sat down on the couch, opened the laptop, looked over at the empty spot on the other side of the cushions and knew I couldn’t go on unless I had a new assistant. Two days later, I did. She’s a little white dog and her name is SuzyQ. And now, my work proceeds just fine.

Eleanor Lerman is the author of numerous award-winning collections of poetry, short stories and novels. She is a National Book Award finalist, the recipient of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts for poetry and the New York Foundation for the Arts for fiction. She has also received the John W. Campbell Award for the Best Book of Science Fiction. Her most recent novel, Watkins Glen (Mayapple Press, 2021), received an Independent Press award, among others. Find her online at eleanorlerman.com and on Facebook (facebook.com/eleanor.lerman).