KMWR: Can you tell us more about how “The Flyer” came about?

JS: I wrote a 500-word version of this story in 2016 that had the same basic premise: A professor gets a call from a woman he’s having an affair with, who tells him he needs to go pick up some stuff he left in their bedroom before her husband comes home. I took that set up -- which was really nice to work with because it had so much inherent action -- and changed the ending and filled in a bunch of detail and backstory. I suppose it was inspired by all the great books and films involving college professors behaving poorly, which is a tried and true characters/setting combo though a little played out. I worked hard on making David unlike your typical “bad boy professor” archetype, and once I came up with the sequence of events following The Kick I knew I had something interesting.

KMWR: The way you write about Jill and her affair with David nearly fooled me as much as David himself.  You write, “The misery washed over me, and I realized, for the first time, that I might have fallen in love.” Can you tell us more about how you crafted the details of their affair, making it feel full and real and not sappy, and still fooling us in the end when Jill turns her back on David?

JS: I spent a lot of time figuring out exactly how David felt about being in this affair -- both during it and now that it’s over, as he’s telling the story -- and what he thought Jill was feeling. I love that you used the word “fooled” because I see David as a bit of a fool. I think he’s someone who is presented with an opportunity to have a fling with a married woman, thinks he can do it in a cool casual way where no one will get hurt, but then gets emotionally attached and is ultimately punished for it. I played around with the way he describes things, trying to strike a balance between a voice that’s naive, a tad immature, but also sensitive and heart broken. I also had to figure out a lot of historic details like how long the affair has been going on, how it started, and how much it has progressed, so I could get a sense of where David’s head is at.

KMWR: I was particularly drawn to the atmosphere of this story; I really felt like I was on campus again. Would you say that your environmental writing lends to your strengths of creating setting in fiction writing?

JS: That’s a great question. My full time job involves writing articles about wildlife and environmental conservation projects, so I do spend a lot of time learning about the history of places and why they look the way they do. It’s not so much writing about nature as it is writing about people harming and repairing nature. For “The Flyer”,  I liked the idea of a beautiful college campus that’s basically empty, since so much of the story is about the dark side of something that might otherwise be romanticized (like an affair). I also liked the idea of Jill living in a high-end suburb that’s closed off from the city, since David is ultimately not on Jill’s level and out of her social class. I didn’t do much at all to describe David’s office, where the story starts, but imagined it as a small, windowless office on a mostly empty and quiet floor, where you’re more likely to run into the janitor than another professor or student. College professors can be some of the most amazing people but their offices are these tiny rooms with zero character.

KMWR: What have you been reading recently and what would you recommend?

JS: I’m reading Crime and Punishment for Halloween. I’m only a third of the way done but I have no idea where it’s going. I can’t tell how satirical it’s supposed to be, which is exciting. I’ve read a handful of Russian short stories from that era and really enjoy how literal the character voices often are and how different the style is from contemporary fiction.

KMWR: Finally, what writing are you working on now?

JS: By the time this is published I’ll have gotten feedback from a story I’m working on from my Charlottesville writing group. So I’ll probably be working on edits to that story. It’s about a young couple who is mourning the loss of a child due to miscarriage while living in a house they’ve just bought. And it's set in the weeks leading up to Christmas.