Quill Hawk Publishing talks to Carol LaHines, Author of Someday Everything Will All Make Sense, a witty and funny novel about an eccentric harpsichordist and professor of early music who navigates the stages of grief following the untimely death of his mother from choking on a wonton.
QHP: Do you have any mentors?
Carol: I spent ten summers studying with Rick Moody at the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College, and it was the finest education I could have ever gotten. Sheila Kohler is also an amazing friend and mentor.
QHP: Did you always want to be in the field you’re in now or did you have another path before you got here?
Carol: I studied music; that education has had a profound influence on my writing. My earliest concepts of sentence and narrative structure were founded on musical principles—rhythm, balance, counterpoint, recursion.
QHP: Who is your favorite writer, and what do you find interesting about their work?
Carol: Nabokov, Joyce, Woolf, Melville, Kafka, Sebald, Calvino are among my favorite writers. I love a prose stylist! What Nabokov scholar Lila Azam Zanganah calls “the demonic artistry of words.” Also, irony, absurdity, a skewed sense of humor. I love imaginative work—all great writing, as Nabokov observed, has the ability to enchant.
QHP: Do you have a favorite book/screenplay/script?
Carol: Moby-Dick, Lolita, Pale Fire.
QHP: Are there any habits you have that have shaped your style?
Carol: I am very ritualistic. I write at the same time every morning. I listen to string quartets or piano trios as I write. I become very deeply concentrated—almost in a fugue state. I write quickly so that I don’t edit or overly analyze as I write. I edit at a separate time of day.
QHP: How do you think your creative process has changed over time?
Carol: My writing routine has not changed much over time, but I have learned to become a much better editor and to have a process for that as well.
QHP: Do you have any websites or social media pages you’d like to share?
Carol: @CLahines (Twitter) | @carollahines (Instagram) | http://www.linktr.ee/clahines | http://www.carollahines
About Carol LaHines
Carol LaHines' debut novel, Someday Everything Will All Make Sense, was a finalist for the Nilsen Prize for a First Novel and an American Fiction Award. Her second novel, The Vixen Amber Halloway, is forthcoming from Regal House in summer 2024. Her fiction has appeared in literary journals including Fence, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Denver Quarterly, Cimarron Review, The Literary Review, The Laurel Review, North Dakota Quarterly, South Dakota Review, The South Carolina Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Sycamore Review, Permafrost, redivider, Literary Orphans, and Literal Latte. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of the Lamar York Prize for Fiction. Her short stories and novellas have also been finalists for the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction from Sarabande Books, the David Nathan Meyerson fiction prize, the New Letters short story award, and the Disquiet Literary Prize, among others. 
