In conversation with Veronica Gonzalez Peña (Les Figues board member and author most recently of The Sad Passions) on Her Kind, Amina Cain, author of I Go To Some Hollow, discusses her writerly interests and her process of composition. “It’s fascinating to me what different writers gravitate to in their work,” she writes.
I have always thought that though I’m a writer, it’s not language I’m drawn to when I’m working on my stories—more than that, it’s image. Sometimes fictional situation. And always atmosphere/setting. Plot has never been important to me. Character, I’m not sure, but certainly the relationships between characters. And definitely narrative and voice. So much can be carried in the voice, a swimming out. I think that when plot is not the thing holding a fictional work together then other kinds of scaffolding can emerge, perhaps dreamlike. I don’t plan anything out either, relying instead on my subconscious. That’s probably where some of the floating sensibility comes from. I write to see what is inside my mind—a bit like meditation.
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