Featured Interview With Taylor Thornburg
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
Taylor Thornburg is an author in and of the Midwest. He was born in mid-Missouri, grew up in eastern Nebraska, and now resides in Chicago, Illinois where he works and writes. Despite his mild-mannered home, he has a taste for drama and the avantgarde, penning works inspired by the twentieth century’s great surrealists, modernists, and melodramatic auteurs.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
Taylor Thornburg began writing at an early age. Swept up in the generational zeitgeist of the Harry Potter series in print and New Line Cinema’s Lord of the Rings series on film, he connected literature with magic in his formative years. The 1996 children’s novel Frindle provided additional encouragement, suggesting that publication was possible, even for a child. After the age of ten, Taylor Thornburg was consistently writing either amateur works of literature, poetry, academic papers, or film concepts.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Taylor Thornburg’s favorite writers tend towards the modern and postmodern. From the modernists, he may be reading Hemingway, Faulkner, Woolf, or others. Among the postmodernists, he may be reading Nabokov, Pynchon, or Krasznahorkai. He began writing seriously under the influence of the Japanese surrealists Yoko Ogawa, Hiromi Kawakami, and, of course, Haruki Murakami. The most important component of a book or story for Taylor Thornburg is its idea and expression, meaningful content and complimentary and interesting form.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
Agathe, 6:00 p.m. to 7:27 is Taylor Thornburg‘s first novel. In this text, a woman comes home to an empty house and a letter on the kitchen table. Her partner is gone. He isn’t coming back. Reeling, she regresses memory by memory to the day they met and progresses memory by memory to the present day looking for fault, deceit, and the truth, if the truth is to be found at all, between the jagged edges of love and heartache. From here to there and back again, she resurrects car crashes, bar fights, torrid affairs, phantoms from the past, and visions of the future. All of it Agathe. All of it 6:00 p.m. to 7:27.