Email gets a bad rap. Well, actually, it might be largely deserved, but that’s not the fault of email itself. Everyone loves the ding of a good email showing up. A unique part of being a writer is waiting a long time for an email only to have it be a rejection. Writers, then, especially need some nice emails. Long story short, Mitch Nobis wanted more good emails, and because he also likes interviewing writers, Inbox Wisdom: Email Interviews on Creativity was born.

Chloe N. Clark is the author of Collective Gravities, Escaping the Body, Patterns of Orbit, and more. She is also a founding co-EIC of Cotton Xenomorph.

You might need to tell us a bit about your work first, but I know you write a lot of sci-fi or speculative fiction. I’m curious how…I guess we’ll call it…daily conditions in America impact your work. How do you find that the news or even just daily personal life affects your writing? With reality feeling less realistic, does that affect your speculative writing? Or do you keep your writing separated from daily life? 

I do write primarily speculative fiction and poetry (and some realistic-ish fiction about basketball). Of course daily conditions affect my writing often in stark ways–I think it’s hard to be cognizant of the world around you and not feel the weight of it all in the stories you tell. I also think writers have a tendency to pay attention to the world around them in very specific ways–so when things are happening in the real world that are already things I’m thinking about/concerned with, it can make that writing feel one of two ways. Either way more imperative that I write it or way more hopeless. and I think it’s important for me to try to balance those two feelings out.

I remember when my first story collection, Collective Gravities, came out it was in the middle of 2020 and a lot of reviews mentioned that it seemed very prescient–despite me having written the stories in it over a ten year span. I wasn’t attempting to be forward-looking, but I think by the nature of being someone who reads the news, pays attention to science and the world around me, and writes about the future, it’s hard to not sometimes hit on the way the world will be. And that’s kind of terrifying when you write a lot of depressing sci-fi and horror.

While the news affects my writing, and affects my mood which DEFINITELY affects my writing, I think my daily life affects it in a much more sideways style. I am not a writer who is any way autobiographical, but I do often “figure” out stories through day-to-day life and interactions with the world around me. A story I wrote last year was one I’d been mulling over for ages and I realized a big plot point by taking a walk and seeing a reflection in water in a weird way.  I’ve also understood characters better because of conversations with people.

And as far as the way that reality may be feeling less realistic…well, I think speculative fiction (for me) has always been about capturing the more real than reality. I remember hearing an explanation once for why people often don’t like photographs of themselves and it’s because a photo shows how you actually look and a mirror shows you the mirrored (reversed) image of yourself. You’ve only ever seen yourself in a mirror, so that’s the way you’re “supposed” to look. I feel like speculative fiction lets us take a photo of the world and show it back to ourselves. It’s not the way it looks to us, but maybe that’s because it’s the true way the world looks.

Wow, I love that answer. I think it really hits on the importance of fiction too because we’re better when we look at the world from new perspectives. I was just talking with another writer about that study they did maybe a decade ago where they put people in MRI machines while reading long fiction. No surprise to anyone who reads, but they ended up with empirical evidence proving that reading does indeed activate the empathy mechanisms in (portions of? areas of?) our brains. It’s also no surprise that we have an empathy gap in American life as fewer and fewer adults report having read a book in the last year. If you were tasked with assigning one book to the average person with the goal of building their empathy muscles, what would you pick? (And to be fair, coming in I had no intention of asking this question and am totally unsure what my own answer would be….)

Oh my gosh–this feels like an impossible question to answer! I think there’s three possible answers I’d give and it would change depending on the day. An oldie would be something by Steinbeck and probably Of Mice and Men. But I lean probably towards either Victor LaValle’s absolutely incredible The Ballad of Black Tom (one of the books I’ve bought the most copies of because I give it away so much). On a gentler more hopeful note though I think Station Eleven and its narrative of community making in times of terror might also be good.

I haven’t read that one, but I read LaValle’s The Changeling last year and was absolutely captivated. Great stuff, and Station Eleven is a great suggestion for a common read! I’ve taught Of Mice and Men to high schoolers a thousand times, so I have a love/hate relationship with that one at this point. Okay, hoops time. You and I have talked about basketball fiction before. We have plenty of great baseball novels but precious few basketball novels. You and I are hoping to change that and both have basketball books in the works (ahem, um, hey agents, mine is 99.9% ready now if you’re interested…). What would a rich basketball literature look like to you? What kinds of basketball books do we need on store and library shelves? 

I think basketball literature should be expansive. I just finished reading The Antidote by Karen Russell and I love how basketball plays a key role in it but it’s not a “basketball novel” per se. Instead, the richness and athleticism and team spirit are infused alongside all of the other narrative threads. Give me big weird basketball novels, give me achingly lovely basketball novels (Marisa Crane’s A Sharp Endless Need), give me basketball stories that tell the history of the US.  I want it all!

As for basketball books, I totally agree. I want all kinds, and Crane’s new book arrived a week or so ago in the mail. That’ll definitely be a summer read for me coming up soon. Let’s do a total gear switching here. On social media, you post a lot of amazing food photos, and it sounds like you’re an amazing chef and baker. This interview series is ostensibly about creativity (hey, basketball is creative!), so what connections do you see between making things in the kitchen and making poems, short stories, or novels? 

I think cooking/baking are inherently creative (as much of the work we must do can be). I also feel like artists need multiple venues of creativity. For me, I take photographs, I sing, and I make food, to balance out all of my art-making energy, I also spend a lot of my time thinking about food and nourishment. I make probably 90-85% of all of our meals from scratch and I’m dedicated to creating balanced food. I think using that part of my brain is very similar to storytelling. It’s about having this disparate pieces and finding harmony in them. My favorite meals to make are often the ones where I have stuff I need to use up–vegetables, half a block of tofu, whatever, and I create something with these ingredients and it’s something so much tastier than thinking of it as wilting cabbage or stale bread or whatever. Writing a story is like that often, too: I have images, a line or two, and I know they can add up to something. And the joy is in that  adding up.

I love that connection between using up what’s in the fridge and adding up the images and ideas to make a story. It reminds me also of Annie Dillard’s advice to spend the good ideas now. That’s something I still struggle with because I’ll want to hold onto an idea until I have all the parts to go with it, so to speak, but she’s right that more ideas will still come. In your analogy, I’d risk letting the food rot while waiting for the right recipe to magically appear!

New question: I saw online recently you said you start with titles, that you don’t write a story until you have the title first. I feel like most authors are the opposite, so how did that start for you? Tell us more about this approach!

I wish I had a really thoughtful and helpful answer to this. I do not. I’ve been writing stories since I figured out how to write and when I was a five year old with a pencil I was the same way as I am as a not-five-year-old with a  keyboard. I think on some level there’s a sense of invitation when you already have a title–the page is no longer blank, so come on in the water’s fine.  I also think that because I’m a very visual writer and need to have at least the first scene completely visualized before I write it makes sense to me that the title comes with that image.

Anyway, I love that answer. I tend toward the visual too (with some exceptions). You said you have the first scene visualized before jumping in. Do you tend to know where you want the story to go after that? Or do you get that first scene down and then see where it takes you? I’m always fascinated by the push/pull of writers who outline and writers who let the narrative wander. That’s probably because I do a bit of both myself. How about you? Once that title and first scene are down, what happens next for your creative process? 

I almost always know the first and last scene, but I don’t necessarily know how they inform and shape each other. So, a lot of the joy is the visualizing it as I go to fill in that gap. I never outline before writing. The few times I have, it made it so that I didn’t enjoy the actual writing process at all. However, I do sometimes do an outline after I’m finished writing the first draft so that I can see how the narrative is piecing together and where places need more connective tissue.  

For me the creative process of the first draft is just a rush of joy. I’m learning the story and it’s shapes as I write it. But, then I edit things forever. I like to hone a piece and its movement for a long time. But that also depends on the story. I wrote my story Accidental Girls after thinking about it for years. I think of it as a simmer story–like it needed time for me to figure it out. When I finally wrote it, because I’d let it percolate so long, I wrote it in one sitting and needed to edit it very little.

But a story like “They Are Coming for You So You Better Run, You Better Run So You Can Hide” started out as a two hundred page novel that I edited over years into a 1000 word flash story.

So I like living on both ends of the writer spectrum. *sobs*

Your last answer is a wild ride! One thing I love about writing is the mystery. There’s a real Wizard of Oz behind-the-curtain element at work. The average reader just wants a good story, but there is an infinite range of ways writers get to that final, polished story you can hold in your hands. I’ve read hundreds of interviews probably at this point (and conducted a few dozen give or take), but I’m still fascinated by all the different processes writers use. My basketball novel is a lot like the first method you mentioned. I wandered through the story until it was down, and then I made an outline to be sure everything worked. I also outlined a couple other sports novels to check out their bones. Somewhere I have a notebook full of “hey check out how this works in The Natural” notes. I’ve mostly been an English teacher for my profession, but because I have very little training in creative writing, I’ve learned a lot by digging deep into mentor texts that way. You work in a wide range of genres, so how does your reading inform your writing? Do you analyze how others do it in a formalized way, or do you keep your reading and writing a little more separate? Or, I’ve heard some writers do this, do you generally eschew reading? 

Interesting, this feels harder to answer. I think reading definitely informs my writing by the nature of it recharging my artistic battery. The more I read, the more I tend to produce writing-wise. However, I don’t think I’m a critical reader (in the sense that I’m not actively thinking about how it does x,y,z while I’m reading it). Instead I am wholeheartedly invested in the narrative journey and how it moves me when I first encounter a text. I read widely (not contained by genre) in fiction, read some poetry and non-fiction. For poetry, I tend to find poets I really like and just read their work a lot, for non-fiction I usually read things on subjects I’m interested in (some exceptions where I’ll read everything the author writes like Hanif Abdurraqib–though he wrote books about basketball and A Tribe Called Quest, so arguably still subjects I love).  I do dig into the craft of something written when I’m teaching it though.

The one thing is I tend to avoid reading similar things to what I’m writing during specific projects. I’m working on a novel about the space race, so I’m not really reading other fiction about near-future space right now (even though I love that stuff).

Writers who eschew reading are……Well, they’re something.

I’m the same way on topics during a project. When I finally finished my basketball novel last year (well, “finished” it, at least–I’m doing edits now based on early reader input before another round of agent queries), I devoured every sports novel I could get a recommendation on. I didn’t want to read heavily in sports fiction while I finished that draft, but I was starved for it once I finally could read sports novels again.

Thank you so much for your patience. This interview has taken something like six months to complete, and we should wrap this up. My favorite last question is to just ask, what’s your most recent book about? Tell us a bit about it, where we can get it, and maybe what you’re working on next? 

My most recent book is Every Galaxy a Circle (JackLeg Press) and it is out in January 2026! It’s a collection of short stories that deal with the weight of memory. There are stories with space anemones, basketball, and pie, so a pretty wide range of interests is covered. You can preorder now from any of the big online retailers or at your favorite indie bookstore or library.

The next projects I’m working on are a novel about the space race, a short story collection about the end of the world, and I am planning to start submitting a new poetry collection as well.

Thank you so much for this interview and your generous questions!

Thanks again for doing this interview series, Chloe!

[Note: Chloe’s forthcoming book is now available for pre-order/order here.]

Inbox Wisdom is an interview series conducted by Farmington writer Mitchell Nobis. He is the author of The Size of the Horizon, or, I Explained Everything to the Trees (Match Factory Editions, 2025). He also hosts the Wednesday Night Sessions reading series for KickstART Farmington, facilitates the Teachers as Poets group for the National Writing Project, and co-founded the Not at AWP (NAWP) reading series. For more, see mitchnobis.com.