1) Where are you from? Why?
There is no satisfactory answer to this question. I usually just say “the Midwest;” people who’ve lived all their lives in one or two places have no idea how hard this question is to answer. The long explanation: I was born in Iowa, we moved to Nebraska when I was pretty little, I mostly grew up there and then we moved again to Wisconsin where I went to high school and some college, and I finished college in/settled in Minnesota for a while until my husband and I moved to DC four years ago. Whew! So where am I from? I have no idea. And to add to the confusion, when I say the Midwest, people think I mean corn fields and farms and things–but I’ve never even lived in the country. I’ve been a city kid all my life. That’s probably a much longer answer than you wanted to this question. Sorry!
2) Please generate a relevant formula.
Oh my god, math. Math is why I am a writer. I’ll do the same thing I always did in math classes: cheat. Isn’t this a beautiful formula?
I love the way formulas look. So shapely and expansive, like every idea in the world was contained in there. Doesn’t this one look as though it could solve your problems? I have no idea what it means; I lifted it from the internet. But to me it’s a story about k and all of k‘s roommates, particularly that troublesome j. j is involved with everyone, clearly. It’s a very short story with a lot of addition and subtraction, but in the end k rejects j and moves to a tiny apartment where she wallows in despair and high utility bills until a meet-cute with her new neighbor solves everything.
3) Write a sentence that is grammatically incorrect, but semantically meaningful.
Driving along the old road back to our childhood villa, the Trees c. Winter, 1992 had already let go of their Leaves c. Fall, 1992.
It made me shudder to write that. Dangling participles are a plague.
4) Stuff or things?
Definitely things. I love beautiful things, but I hate having a lot of stuff around. I’m like the opposite of a hoarder. Compulsive thrower-outer, I guess. So few things remain, but those things are prized and well taken care of.
5) React to the following word: Literature.
Written words, all jammed together. Monkeys on typewriters. Libraries filled with hush and old book smell. Human history, messy and messier. Sprawling and epic, spare and trim, metaphor and simile and allegory and I guess, life. Yes, definitely life. My life, anyway.
6) What is there, and what should we do about it?
There is everything we can possibly imagine. And so we should get busy imagining it.
7) Please describe your favorite noise.
A Steinway grand in a large concert hall.
Amber Sparks’s work has been featured or is forthcoming in Wigleaf, New York Tyrant, PANK, matchbook, the Collagist, and some other places, too. She lives in Washington, D.C. with two cats and a husband, and is currently working on a collection of fiction pieces about characters and motifs from myth and legend. Find her contribution to FictionDaily here.
