KMWR: Can you speak more to how the first draft of “Snapshot of a Mountain” came about?

LN: It was surprisingly easy for me to write. I sat down to write one night with this vague idea about a friendship that falls apart, I knew I wanted the friendship to be a “girl-boy” friendship, and I knew I wanted to explore societal gender structures and how these inadvertently impacted their relationship. I pretty much finished the first draft the next day, which is really fast in comparison to how I usually work. It isn’t an autobiographical piece, but the themes are very close to me, which I think contributed a lot to my writing process.

KMWR: I was drawn to this piece by the narrator’s sincere attempt to make sense of the reforging and eventual collapse of her friendship with Kevin. You write, “I guess I just expected better from someone I regarded as a close friend and someone who regarded me as one. I don’t think it’s a bad thing, expecting better.” Can you say more about what it was like writing the cracking of their friendship?

LN: It mostly just felt sad to write. With that line in particular, I was thinking about the specific disappointment and betrayal you feel when you realize someone you respect might not respect you in return. In this case, the narrator feared that Kevin’s behavior changed for the worse when he was with his toxic friend group, which in extension would mean he never respected her.

On a much broader level, I was thinking about the different ways societal gender structures can potentially influence friendships between boys and girls, because our societies are largely heteronormative. When the narrator and Kevin were kids, the pressure to become “girlfriend and boyfriend” pushed the narrator away from him. As adults, Kevin’s continued association with his toxic friend group from high school was what caused her to push him away. Even though the narrator made the active choice to “break up” with Kevin, there was this helpless quality about the fracturing of their relationship. Kevin isn’t a bad person, and you want him to stop associating with these people so badly, but he doesn’t seem to understand why all of it is such a big deal to the narrator.

KMWR: What would you say are your own personal ideal writing conditions? What about unideal conditions—and do you fight to write anyway?

LN: For me, the ideal/unideal conditions occur almost entirely in my head. If I have an idea and I’m in a good flow, almost any place works for me. I don’t mind noise and can listen to pretty much anything while I write. I once churned out a ridiculously large chunk of a story while in the airport and later on the airplane. But if I try to write with no inspiration, or if my mind is cluttered, I can spend several hours formulating three bad sentences.

KMWR: I really love the form of your recent piece in Nowhere Girl Collective, “Love Potion for the Heartsick Witch or Wizard”! What do you like about writing in hybrid genres?

LN: Thank you, I’m glad you liked it! I think it’s really fun to write in untraditional formats and genres because you aren’t always bound by the same rules that you must consider when writing prose, while you might be bound by other rules. Because “Love Potion” was written as a recipe, I worked within a frame where the narrator instructed both the fictional reader within the universe of the story, and the readers outside of the story, which was really fun to play around with. I really want to try my hand at more hybrid genres in the future.

KMWR: Can you tell us about what you’ve been reading recently and what you’d recommend?

LN: Right now I’m reading The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende and House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski -- it’s a coincidence that both of those books are about a house. The House of the Spirits I’m really enjoying so far! It reminds me a lot of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is one of my favorite books. I’m not far enough into House of Leaves to say much about it other than that the format is really intriguing to me, and I’m really excited to immerse myself in its world. I love metafiction, and I love a story about a sinister house that hates you!

KMWR: Finally, are you working on anything new?

LN: I’m working on a magical realism short story that’s been living in the far back of my head for years. It’s a revamped version of a story I wrote about a group of siblings who go to stay at their uncle’s haunted house over the summer. In other words, it’s also about a house. Again, this was a coincidence (or at least, it wasn’t a conscious decision). 

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Loc-An Thi Nguyen was born to Vietnamese parents in Denmark, and has lived in the city of Aarhus her entire life. She is an emerging writer whose work has also been published in Manila Literary Magazine and Nowhere Girl Collective.