Gina Nutt: Can we begin with Philip Seymour Hoffman? What sparked your narrator’s fascination and kinship with him? How do you see Phil’s presence, or the possibility of Phil’s presence, shaping this narrator and the persona he projects?
TJ Fuller: The story started with my own fascination with Hoffman, wondering why I was so obsessed. For the narrator, I think, Hoffman is powerful in a way he is not used to. It’s not a lording over kind of power. It’s not armed. It’s a power that comes from his vulnerability and presence, and the narrator would love to wield both of those instead of his boots and badge.

GN: The mall setting also seems key to character. How do you see environment contributing to this narrator’s sense of self? What else about the mall inhabits your imagination?
TJF: I used to work at a mall, and I hate malls now. They lack personality. Everything is for sale. They can also be chaotic. The narrator is trying to keep them antiseptic, to be one more device, chasing out anyone who disturbs everyone’s chance to buy and sell. I would imagine it feels like repression to get into that uniform and shoo people who don’t have money off the tile floors all day. The narrator wants to break free of that, but the narrator also wants to get paid. He’s for sale too.

GN:  How did you land upon this story’s lyrical voice?
TJF: I love a story that makes me play catch up, that from the first sentence takes off running, inventing as it goes, and doesn’t stop too often to fill the reader in with all the basics. That’s what I aim for in my own stories. I loved naming all those kinds of Hoffman roles, and I wanted the rest of the draft to live up to that strange, fragmentary naming.

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.  I’m also curious: what’s your favorite Philip Seymour Hoffman film?
TJF: One of my favorite Hoffman performances is Love Liza, the story of a man broken by his wife’s suicide. It’s kind of a mess of a movie, but Hoffman makes the addiction textured, and how Jim O’Rourke, the producer and later member of Sonic Youth, wrote a beautiful soundtrack. It’s a peculiar kind of depressing.

Watching movies alone is an essential part of my creative mosaic. I love having how they make me feel all to myself. If it’s in the theater, I walk back to my car alone and drive home alone and sit in that feeling. It’s like being given a secret. Movies don’t teach me how to write, but they make me want to write.