'What influences and inspires you as a writer?'

As a writer I find it almost impossible to provide a neat list of influences and inspirations.  Without wanting to get too philosophical, I am somebody who believes that each individual, as a person, is formed from a mixture of everything that they've ever experienced.  I have taken in so much (fact and fiction) over the years, that I can't (and wouldn't want to) try to isolate or glorify some of the elements that make up 'me' to the detriment of others.

For me, anything that creates a self-contained world and is able to immerse me in that world, inspires me to try and create something that could have a similar effect on the reader.

My main interest at present is in the creation of pieces where the world that is presented seems familiar to the reader, but is actually subtly different to reality.  I don’t want to write horror, but I do particularly enjoy reading stories where the world in which the story is set has something slightly discordant and unexplained in its workings.

Some of Cheever’s stories exhibit this quality.  ‘The Enormous Radio’ is an obvious example, where the radio does not work in the manner that the reader would expect a radio to operate.

However, ‘The Swimmer’ plays with the notion of time itself in order to make the story work.  I would argue that playing with the reader’s notion of time, a fundamental building block of our perception, will always have a more dramatic effect on the reader than a malfunctioning appliance.