How, I wondered, would it compare with the place I had imagined? So extensive was this research that it was with some trepidation that many drafts into my novel I embarked on an actual trip to Iquitos. Thus began a process of learning about Iquitos and the surrounding jungle: reading histories and anthropologies and guidebooks of the region, countless viewings of Fitzcarraldo and the documentary about the parallels between the film and its making, talking to persons who had journeyed there. Now, though, I had a character from a place I had never seen and, with a new baby, would have no opportunity to visit any time soon. Stories have been set in Guatemala, Prince Edward Island, Paris-all places where I've spent time. I wrote the first draft of the section of my first novel that takes place in the Pyrénées-Orientales in a thousand year-old mas in a village there. The unscientific method draws from the same well out of which I conceive the settings for my stories and novels: using fragments of information that two decades ago would arrive in the mail in spidery letters and Xeroxed photographs or that these days reside on glossy websites, faster to access but with the same landmines of hidden highways and hornets' nests, to imagine the rooms, the garden, the village, the nearby mountains and sea. Friends often ask for the secret to how I have happily rented cottages in remote villages from Andalucia to Crete. Like many writers, traveling and writing have always been intertwined for me. Now a fictive character, Eva, she came through the strange alchemy of the imagination to hail from an entirely different corner of the world, the Amazonian city of Iquitos, Peru-the largest landlocked city in the world, accessible only by air or water, no roads able to penetrate the surrounding jungle and mountains-which I'd first learned about through Werner Herzog's film Fitzcarraldo.
Wanting to protect her privacy and identity, I stripped away her biographical details, leaving only the emotional heart of what happened to her. Her story haunted me and inspired my second novel, Tinderbox. Many years ago, a babysitter I knew went deeply mad. A collection of linked stories, Louisa Meets Bear, is forthcoming with Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux. and the psychoanalytic training program at Columbia. in clinical psychology from Yale, and is a graduate of the writing program at N.Y.U. Her stories and essays have been widely published, including in AGNI, Prairie Schooner, and The Sun, and have received many awards including Distinguished Story by the Best American Short Stories, finalist Glimmer Train Fiction Open, and winner Summer Literary Seminars Unified Literary Contest. Lisa Gornick is the author of two novels, Tinderbox (Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and A Private Sorcery (Algonquin).
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