"Lying within the Lie" My Interview in The Collagist

I was interviewed by the wonderful online journal TheCollagist about my short story “One True Thing.” The story appears in THIS ANGEL ON MY CHEST (and online, in The Collagist), and in my mind is infamous because:

~It’s 40 pages long!

~It uses 10 different points of view!

~It takes place at a writers’ conference “no one” would recognize!
~I discovered something utterly crucial and foundational to the story an hour after I thought the story was finally finished...no one would ever guess that this was the last puzzle piece.

~It took me more than a year to write and figure out this story, and I  joke that the experience nearly killed me.

Here’s a tease from the interview:

 I love writing (and reading) second person stories, but I agree with the craft lecture here, that it’s a tricky point of view to carry off and that it’s dangerous to use that POV in an MFA workshop. (Maybe the word isn’t so much “dangerous” as it is “tedious”…because at least half the allotted workshop time will be spent talking about how two-thirds of the class despises the second person.) I love the first person as well, but I’m mindful that if third person is the standard and default choice of POV, there must be a legitimate reason for choosing the first person. For me, that reason is often unreliability. While all fiction technically is a lie, I especially love lying within that lie, it seems, making me very fond of unreliable narrators.

  

Here’s the rest of the interview: http://thecollagist.com/collagist-blog/2016/4/23/lying-within-the-lie-an-interview-with-leslie-pietrzyk.html

Here’s the story (in case you haven't bought my book yet!!): http://thecollagist.com/the-collagist/2015/2/6/one-true-thing.html