Gina Nutt: “Galluzzo” is intriguing and intense in its brevity. What drew you to the short form for this story?
JoAnna Novak: Existing even in the fictional reality of a missing child is deeply uncomfortable to me. The short form was a mercy both to myself and to this protagonist, who is really struggling.

GN: You also evoke a unique sense of distance through third-person narration. How did you decide on this perspective?
JN: The protagonist’s interoception has been drastically shaped by a head injury. Pain’s ongoingness estranges her from herself. Third-person seemed best suited to conveying, as you note, that unique sense of distance.

GN:The imagery has the poetic romance of a vacation, yet on a narrative level there’s a stark absence when the main character’s son wanders off. How did you braid and refine these details?
JN: How they originate is somewhat mysterious to me, but in revision I worked to heighten that dreamy romance, I suppose, by trying to distill each sentence to its lushest image or bit of language. Then, being sort of in thrall to whatever beauty that produces seems to agitate me toward plot, or some semblance of it.

GN:What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
JN: Recently, I fell in love with Fabio Morábito’s latest story collection, The Shadow of the Mammoth. I perpetually return to John Zorn, Bill Frisell, Julian Lage, and Gyan Riley’s album 2021 Teresa de Ávila. My favorite film of the last year was The Secret Agent, and listening to Richard Linklater talk about his long career and his deep love of cinema, shortly after Blue Moon’s release, has stayed with me. Entranced by Matthieu Blazy’s elegant shake-up at Chanel.