The Lit Hub Author Questionnaire is a monthly interview featuring seven questions for five authors with new books. This month we talk to:

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Tahmima Anam (Uprising)
Gabriel Bump (Don’t Stop Snowing)
Siân Hughes (No Such Thing as Monday)
Matt Kish (Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page)
Nick Paumgarten (The Intangibles: Friendship, Fatherhood, and the Love of the Game)

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Without summarizing it in any way, what would you say your book is about?

Tahmima Anam: Female rage.

Gabriel Bump: Fathers and sons. Getting better. Friendship. Books. Buffalo. The Great Lakes.

Siân Hughes: My book is about trauma, and how survivors of child abuse have missing pieces of their memories, and the different ways this impacts them throughout their lives.

Matt Kish: Seeing language, reading pictures, living inside a story, the myths we believe in childhood, the harsh realities we confront as we age, the magic of a story that upon every re-read is simultaneously familiar and completely new, and most of all the essential nature of imagination.

Nick Paumgarten: Hockey. Hockey as a core sample of my life and times. Other stuff besides hockey. Roughhousing, marriage, guys being guys, fathers and sons, the body, love, time, New York City.

Without explaining why and without naming other authors or books, can you discuss the various influences on your book?

Gabriel Bump: A blue sky meeting blue water over the Mackinac Bridge. Independent bookstores across the Great Lakes region. Winter in Buffalo. Waking up and working on yourself.

Matt Kish: The scent of secondhand bookstores, winter afternoons watching monster movies at Nana’s, comic books, the Golden Age of Illustration, late-night conversations as an undergrad, America good and bad, fear, and the ocean.

Nick Paumgarten: The Charlestown Chiefs, Chico’s Bail Bonds, Combray, Ishmael, the sights/sounds/smells of the rink and the room. I think I suffer less from anxiety of influence than from amnesia of it. A function maybe of a disorganized brain. Or a concussed one.

Tahmima Anam: The Irish republican dirty protests, the folk songs of Fakir Lalon, and the demon deity of the Sundarbans mangrove forest, Bon Bibi.

Siân Hughes: The book is influenced a LOT by other works of literature, so this is tricky to answer! The book grew out of a short story I wrote in the voice of a boy whose brother is being abused openly in front of him all the time but the boy narrating the story cannot see it. He has been trained not to see it. The story was called “My Brother’s Dog” and there was no dog in it. The brother had no dog. But the story never worked because it was basically a story that the narrator cannot tell you, about things the narrator cannot see. It was a story about a dog that was not there. It was a challenge to expand that into a whole novel where the narrative voice is not broken but the narrator is neurologically incapable of telling you the most important thing you need to know about who they are and how they were made.

Without using complete sentences, can you describe what was going on in your life as you wrote this book?

Siân Hughes: Oh, the usual, looking after my family, adjusting to the death of my father, trying to run a book shop that made zero money, trying to stop my ancient building where we all live from falling down, getting dumped by my partner, trying not to be a grumpy old cow to everyone…various degrees of success in all those things…

Nick Paumgarten: Empty nest, various aging arcs, some deaths to near-and-dears, on-and-off-again New Yorker work, marginal stabs at self-improvement amid the general enshittification of the world. The usual sine waves of worry and contentment.

Tahmima Anam: Bursting into flames.

Gabriel Bump: Sunshine after a long dark night. Beauty everywhere, out of nowhere. A realization. Wonderful. All of it wonderful. Can you believe it?

Matt Kish: Aging, milestone birthdays, regret, depression, restless searching, loneliness, and obsession obsession obsession.

What are some words you despise that have been used to describe your writing by readers and/or reviewers?

Matt Kish: Naive, childlike, near-competent.

Siân Hughes: Despise is a big fat word! None that I go that far with. In character-driven fiction, if someone does not love the character, that is their heart, and no one’s fault. You cannot help who you love.

Gabriel Bump: Pointless. Horrible. Terrible. People on Goodreads are mean!

Nick Paumgarten: It hurts my feelings when someone says my writing is bad. I’ve been called a “stylist” more than once, and that smarts. People get weird about commas. I like commas.

Tahmima Anam: Triggering.

If you could choose a career besides writing (irrespective of schooling requirements and/or talent), what would it be?

Nick Paumgarten: River guide. Or bassist.

Tahmima Anam: Ice cream flavor inventor.

Matt Kish: Printmaking. I love the idea that art can and should be attainable by anyone, belong to everyone, and be mass-produced instead of fetishized.

Siân Hughes: I’ve had a lot of jobs. Some that I did love. I worked for a choir for homeless people, and if I were more musical I would do more music things like that, not just making the dinner and booking the room kind of thing. I’m in awe of choir leaders. In the same way I would love to run creative textile workshops in the kind of mental health centers where I have run creative writing. But I am not good enough at that kind of craft, however much I love it.

Gabriel Bump: Attacking midfielder for a seventh-division Norwegian team. Knausgaard does something like it in My Struggle and it sounds like a lot of fun.

What craft elements do you think are your strong suit, and what would you like to be better at?

Tahmima Anam: I’m good at endings, but I would like to be vastly better at describing trees.

Nick Paumgarten: I wish I were better at just saying smart or honest things. Also, critical writing—assessments, framing—comes hard. I think I’ve gotten to be pretty good at expressing or evoking feeling without being too treacly. Maybe.

Siân Hughes: I am beginning to see all my stories grow out of a setting that I fall in love with, and the characters appear in that setting once it is clear in my mind. But I never really know what the characters are going to do until they do it. So plotting is a serious challenge to me. The characters stay with me after the book is finished, and I can tune into them any time, as if they were still real and out there somewhere living their lives, but it does not help me to build a plot for them. This makes writing very inefficient, as I write easily ten times as much as ever ends up being a useful part of the book, but I have simply accepted it is my way of working.

Gabriel Bump: I’m pretty good, I think, at capturing complex emotions through sentences. I wish I were better at writing ruminative independent films that become runaway smash hits.

Matt Kish: I think I have a good sense of color and some ability to build shapes and images through texture and repetition. I would very much like to be better at anatomy and complex compositions.

How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything?

Gabriel Bump: I’m interested in lots of pointless and self-indulgent stuff. Why shouldn’t other weirdos be interested in that stuff too?

Matt Kish: I don’t ever allow myself the luxury of that kind of self-aggrandizing anxiety. I make the art I would like to see, for the stories that matter to me, and to explore my own relationships with stories. I truly hope it resonates and connects with people, and I am sincerely grateful when it does. But I don’t think that is something that I am owed, nor do I consider my work “bad” or my efforts wasted when it does not.

Nick Paumgarten: I’ll have a drink or a good sweat, or dive into something made by someone else (movie, book, music, whatever), or just wait for the ego-tide to come back in, which it always does. Writing can be pretty gross, for this reason among others, but such is the life we’ve chosen.

Siân Hughes: I am not sure I suffer from this affliction! I am always touched that anyone asks. My absolute favorite thing is when a reader says they thought the book was about them, and found it connected with their own life. Then I feel I have done something really worthwhile.

Tahmima Anam: By writing what I (and you) would rather not know.