How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit Nicole Kornher-Stace's website.
At the outset, not very much! It becomes obvious later on but not until we're a good chunk of the way through the book. Titles usually for me go one of two ways: it occurs to me out of nowhere and I know immediately that it's the title I want to use, or I agonize for days/weeks/months over it before just slapping something on because I can't very well try to publish a book or story without one. This, luckily, was the former. There was some short story I'd read years ago that used the word "firebreak" in a nonliteral sense, in that case to contain a viral pandemic--I wish I could remember the story so I could credit the author, but I think it must have been in one of hundreds of library books I've borrowed over the past few years so I have literally no idea even whether it was in an anthology or collection or what. In any case, in hindsight it's amusing because there's a ton of concepts in this book that ended up being news headlines in 2020, with the glaring exception of the, y'know, global pandemic. The fact that the title was inspired by a pandemic short story, though, kind of...[read on]
Q&A with Nicole Kornher-Stace.
--Marshal Zeringue
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