Caren Gussoff
Author of Homecoming (Serpent's Tail)
EVENT: Reading at Elliott Bay Book Company, Wed April 18, 7:30 pm.

How long have you been in Seattle? "I've been here six months. Actually, the love of my life lives in Seattle. I'd been in Portland for a couple of years, and we just got sick of taking the train up and down, back and forth, every weekend.

"I grew up in New York, but I lived in seven states in 10 years--I wasn't on the lam or anything, I just... there was boarding school, and college, and my parents moving. I lived in Vermont for a while and couldn't stand it. There were more sheep than people. I worked as a cider-press operator. Then my parents, who are older (I was a surprise), retired to Miami and after college I moved there, but I don't tan and I'm not a 75-year-old Jewish retiree or a 35-year-old gay Latino hairdresser, so I moved to Colorado, which was as far west as I could imagine at the time."

What do you think of Seattle? "Wow, traffic. Explain traffic to me. You can go out at 2:30 in the morning on a Tuesday and you can't get across 520. I don't know where all these people are going at the same time. But I really like Seattle. Seattle is a city of smart people."

Speaking of 2:30 am, I read Homecoming last night. The thing that struck me was the gorgeous restraint of the descriptions. "I'm addicted to language. I have a notebook I carry to write phrases in. But when you say it was restrained, I think you're describing the battle I had in Homecoming: I wanted to tell the story of one woman, who returns and tries to make sense of her life, but I also wanted to show how we are all a fine product of what has happened to us in the past.

"I've been told reading my stuff is a lot of work. I think that pleases me. I want to create a work that describes a specific story but leave the language and structure open enough so that the reader can enter into it, has to work to enter into it, has to participate. That sounds sort of highfalutin and I'm not so sure it worked great in Homecoming, but I hope I get better at it."