Q&A

1. Tell us about yourself.

I have both the curiosity and bladder of a four-year-old, and I’ve only ever managed to get one of those under control. I was also bitten by the travel bug pretty early in life which–when combined with my curiosity–has taken me on some very unexpected journeys. At one point I was living in California, trying to get back to New Zealand, and I ended up living in Japan for a year. But as a result, I’ve been fortunate enough to have had some incredible experiences, with unbelievable people, in amazing places.

2. Give a brief description of your book, Show Yourself.

Show Yourself is a quirky literary thriller intended to provoke, inspire curiosity, and hopefully get a few laughs.

The story follows Tristan, whose best friend is murdered in front of him. Tristan throws himself into secretly hunting for the killer, with no real idea of what he’s doing, while also trying to raise the young daughter of his murdered friend.

3. Why did you write Show Yourself?

I love seeing a character learn and discover what they are capable of. And I have always loved a good underdog. I wanted to explore, as genuinely as I could, what would happen if an everyday person was thrown into the deep end. For example, if someone murdered your best friend and you wanted to find the killer yourself. What would that look like? What would that actually mean? Where would you even start? And I wanted the reader to experience that discovery alongside the narrator as closely as possible, to immerse the reader in all of the intricate emotions and confusions of the characters involved.

4. What can you tell us about your writing method?

My brain is always buzzing. I write everywhere. Walking on the beach, showering, driving, everywhere. The ideas toss and tumble in my head until I am finally able to record or write them down. And they generally come in as a tangled mess. Bits and pieces from all over the shop–a smell of an idea, the texture of another, a taste of a character quirk–but while they all might be true to the story at hand, they’re often not interesting enough, or they’re too clunky or vague, so the process ends up being more about cutting things out than coming up with new material. I basically throw up on the page and try to clean up the mess until I figure out what it was that I wanted to say in the first place. Once I sort that out, I then remove all the excess until the smallest amount of effective material remains. After that, I edit for cadence.

5. You never specifically name any of the locations in the story. Is there a reason for that? Where does the story take place?

I intentionally avoided naming any specific locations because I wanted the setting to be rooted in each individual reader’s unique world. By focusing on including only the most relevant points, it lets the reader fill in the rest with their own memories and experiences, which I think makes it more real and interactive. Hopefully it engages them more intimately.

6. The concept of fear is broached repeatedly in your book. What moved you to include fear so prominently?

This is an incredibly complicated topic, so I’ll do my best to summarize.

All of our emotions are responses to our perceptions. And fear is an emotional response to a perceived threat or danger. However, because our perceptions are the product of our experiences–and that includes what we’ve been taught–we can have fear responses to both actual and imagined threats and dangers.

One of the biggest triggers of imagined threats is when we are confronted with the unknown. But the problem here is that our existence is, essentially, entirely composed of unknowns. So people become afraid of what is simply life. And that fear strangles our capacity for appreciation. Largely, the appreciation that we are alive.

If even a single reader of my book finds something useful there to help their own lives, I’ll call that a success.

7. What was the most challenging part of writing this book?

I think the most challenging part was using material I had written so long ago. I had the idea for this book almost twenty years ago. I would write bits here and there. And in those twenty years, I grew and changed. So when I sat down in ernest to actually write the majority of it last year, there were a lot of sections that no longer aligned. But, damn it, I liked them! Ha. So I had to do a lot of surgery with a chainsaw. And spent a lot of time reminding myself of what the story was actually about.

8. What other books have inspired you?

So many. Anything written by Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein. Stephen King’s It, The Long Walk, and On Writing. Michael Crichton’s Travels. Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine and the Martian Chronicles. His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. Anthem by Ayn Rand. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and far too many others of his to list. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. Various books and lectures by Alan Watts, and the same goes for Richard Feinman. Candide by Voltaire. A Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Destiny’s Road by Larry Niven. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. 1984 by George Orwell. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. Think Indigenous by Doug Good Feather. And so many more…

9. How did you come up with the title?

The book is about Tristan trying to find a murderer. But it is equally about Tristan uncovering and understanding who he himself really is. So, the title is intended to be a play on words. Officially it is Show Yourself to represent the main plot, but the cover can also be read as Show Your Self to represent the prominent theme of self discovery.

10. What is your favorite passage in the book and why?

I love the enamel boxcar line. “As she turned to walk away, the scrap in her teeth waved goodbye like a little freight-hopping vegetable hobo, hanging out the door of an enamel boxcar.” It’s a perfect example of how my mind obsessively makes spontaneous connections between all sorts of randomness. I also love the entire “Nothing and Everything” chapter. It’s so unconventional and might seem out of place, but it is a metaphor for one the main themes in the book, and for life.

11. What aspects of your own life helped inspire this book?

There is a lot of me in there, but I think my experiences from traveling inspired a major component of the book. I have met so many amazing people while traveling–people who I became incredibly close with. I feel there is an intense bond between people who have a shared love for new experiences and diversity. But it’s sort of an impossible situation because the very nature of traveling is impermanence. All you get are those moments together. And the immense beauty of it all is juxtaposed by the inevitable loss and pain that comes with having to eventually say goodbye. I still struggle to reconcile it. But it’s such a profound portrait of appreciation for the present, that I wanted to bring that experience to the reader in a way that was hopefully somewhat tangible.

12. What can readers hope to learn from this book?

I hope they learn something about themselves. I hope they learn that this life is beautiful, and that it’s flying by fast, so they better breathe it in.