Dana Diehl is an author and educator based in Southern Arizona. Her upcoming collection of short stories, The Earth Room, has won the 2024 Hudson Prize, and two of the stories in this book, “The Woman Through the Door” and “Quicksand,” were published in Invisible City. Her other notable works include Our Dreams Might Align (Splice UK, 2018) and TV Girls (New Delta Review, 2018). She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University. We are honored to have this interview with her, in which she shares her writing experiences and offers advice to aspiring writers.
Your award-winning book, The Earth Room, is scheduled for release next January. Congratulations on that! I would like to ask on behalf of your readers, what shall we expect from this new work?
The Earth Room is more speculative and witchy than some of my previous works. There are stories with ghosts. There is a magical doorway in a nursing home, a woman exploring abandoned mines, animal transformations, and women disappearing into the woods. I was watching a lot of David Lynch and horror movies while writing these stories, and I think that comes through.
I feel that nature has always been a major theme of your writing. Could you say a bit about how nature has shaped your writing?
Nature has been a gateway into my imagination since I was a kid. I spent a lot of time outside and in the woods growing up, and I felt like nature was a place where reality was a bit more tenuous. In the books I read, children set out into the woods and had all these strange, unexpected encounters. In The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, it’s when the siblings leave the city and go into the countryside that they find their way to Narnia. That magical way of thinking about nature has carried itself into my adulthood and into my writing practice. I love going into nature because it’s meditative and it clears my mind, but also, I love setting my stories in wild places because narratively, anything feels possible in the woods. Something strange can happen to my characters, and it feels like it makes sense.
You mentioned in “The Magic of Fact” that researching the facts about nature was a big part of writing Our Dreams Might Align. Did you do some similar research for The Earth Room?
I did. I think plants and animals and glaciers and mountains are endlessly mysterious and interesting. When I’m feeling stuck in a story, researching the setting can give me insight into what happens next. I think our environments can influence how we see ourselves and become metaphors for what we are going through in our own human lives. So in my stories, I like to let the environments determine the plot to a degree.
One story I did a lot of research for was “Quicksand,” which was published in Invisible City. It’s about a woman who can magically disappear objects into her body, but she has no control over when it happens. The fictional town the story is set in was inspired by the town where I grew up in Pennsylvania, a place that was once known as the lumber capital of the world. That area of Pennsylvania now looks very wooded and beautiful, and as a kid, I assumed I was hiking through old, ancient forests, but when you look at the pictures of my town from the 1800s, you see mountainsides stripped bare and rivers choked solid with downed trees. The forests I knew were actually relatively young and the result of reforestation efforts. This research gave me a new perspective on my home and helped me to find the story’s emotional core.
You have been a long-term educator, teaching classes from elementary to college level. I wonder how teaching has affected your writing, if any?
It’s definitely impacted my writing. Right now, I teach fourth-grade English, and I have a couple of stories inspired by the interesting, funny things my students have said. But teaching has also impacted me at a craft level. When I teach a new topic, especially something complicated or grammar-related, I have to think about the best way to present it to my students. I think about what context my students need before starting the lesson and in what order I reveal information. What questions are my students likely to have, and at what point should I answer them? I think about how to control when those questions pop up for them. What information do I withhold so I don’t overwhelm them until they are more confident? It involves a lot of anticipation of how people take in information. I think this thought process mimics what you have to do as a fiction writer, especially when your writing has speculative elements. Being a teacher has helped me get better at it.
Any specific story that’s inspired by your students?
I have a story about a woman who gives birth to a ghost, and that came from something one of my students said. Something along the lines of, “They’re not dead, they are ghosts.” The idea of a ghost not being dead was really interesting to me!
Which writers have influenced or inspired your work the most?
Anthony Doerr’s short stories influenced me pretty early on, when I was still an undergrad student. Two other writers are Laura van den Berg and Megan Mayhew Bergman. I will read anything that they publish. I really admire how they blend reality and the surreal. I especially admire how Megan Mayhew Bergman interacts with nature and environmental issues and the sciences. All three of those writers have published the most beautiful stories.
Is there one book that you would read over and over and over again?
I think it’d have to be a book that has some nostalgia for me, something from childhood. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien is a story that I could reread for the rest of my life. I’ve been listening to it on audiobook lately. It’s such a rich text that every time I read it, I connect with and notice something different.
If you could give one piece of advice to people who want to write and become published authors in the future, what would it be?
My advice would be to lift up other writers and read widely. Read what’s being published in literary journals, and when you find work you enjoy, champion it, share it. In general, be a generous, kind member of your writing community.
If you’re willing to share, is there any project that you are currently working on that we could expect to read in the future?
I don’t know if this will ever see the light of day, but I’m currently trying to write a middle-grade fantasy novel inspired by Scottish folklore. I studied abroad in Scotland, and I constantly find myself drawn back to Scotland in my work. This project has been an incredibly slow and staggered process for me, and I haven’t written in this genre before. But I work with middle-grade readers every day as an English teacher. I think they are some of the most thoughtful, pure, excited readers out there, and I would love one day to publish something that they could read.
Photo by jeein