Interview with Deanna Gibson, Author of "She Left Before I Could Love Her"

Interview with Deanna Gibson, Author of She Left Before I Could Love Her

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• Question: Could we start off by having you tell me a bit about yourself and your piece?

"I'm 18 years old and I go to Huron High School. I started writing seriously freshman year of high school. Ever since then I've been writing short fiction and poetry."

• Question: Your piece seems to cover a lot about mental illness and familial struggles all at once. Can you tell me a bit more about the emotions you developed through this piece? To me I felt this sort of rushed-explanation-type story, almost as if the narrator had to tell the series of events often and had memorized a response.

"I'm not really sure how to answer that. I just wanted to tell a sad story. I don't force myself to have a big plan before I write I just use the stream-of-consciousness method to get started. This isn't something I experienced but I just enjoy telling stories. The topic of experiencing what you write comes up a lot though. It reminds me of an article called I Am Not My Poem which mentions that writers are not restricted by their experiences."

• Question: You had a paragraph towards the end where you said, “Eventually puffy eyes grew tired of the moon. It was time to stop waiting for useless fantasies. Time for a realistic solution,” could you tell me a bit more about this section? Why did you include the moon as a piece in the partial-climax of the story?

"I don't actually know. It was just something that popped into my head. People often look up at the moon and I just played with that idea."

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To learn more about Deanna, She Left Before I Could Love Her, and her writing, check out the First Edition of Pufferfish at the Neutral Zone's Shopify (link here)