Interview with Author Christine Sneed

Novelist and short story author Christine Sneed is as smart as they come. Her prose is witty and precise, cutting and surprising. Reading her short stories is always a page-turning experience for me. In the end, her characters show me that shallow isn’t what it seems, that failure is haunting, that we’re so often the victim of our own poor choices. But none of these truisms are easily handled in life, or in fiction. These challenges are complex and strange. Time and again, Christine’s stories show me how her characters work through or within these predicaments, and how they build up their own worlds full of problems (often self-created), only to get torn down or shown things they’d just as soon not realize about themselves.

Here, Christine talks with us about obstacle and desire in fiction, and also shares a personal moment of epiphany she experienced in the Notre Dame cathedral as an aspiring writer in her twenties. Enjoy, and don’t miss her stellar book recs at the end!