Alyssa Songsiridej discusses the first pages of her debut novel, Little Rabbit, including her process of moving between longhand and typing her pages, a process which helps her quiet her anxieties and keep her early work private. We also talk about her choice to begin and end with the image that sparked her book, how she wrote to discover her character, and how that discovery offered surprises both for herself and for her reader.
Songsiridej’s first pages can be found here.
Help local bookstores and our authors by buying this book on Bookshop.
Click here for the audio/video version of this interview.
The above link will be available for 48 hours. Missed it? The podcast version is always available, both here and on your favorite podcast platform.
Alyssa Songsiridej is a fiction writer and editor. Her debut novel, Little Rabbit, was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, long listed for the Pen/Hemingway Award, and named a National Book Foundation “5 under 35” Honoree. The novel was named a best book of the year by the New Yorker, The San Francisco Chronicle, Electric Literature, and more. Her short fiction can be found at StoryQuarterly, The Indiana Review, and Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. She has been honored and supported by Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, Lighthouse Works, the VCCA, the Vermont Studio Center, KHN Center, MassMoca’s Assets for Artists, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is an editor at Electric Literature.
Passages: Alyssa Songsiridej on Little Rabbit