Hi everyone! My name is Alyssa
Cooper, and I'm today's guest blogger here on Sabina's Adventures in reading.
I'm just a weird Canadian girl with a life-long passion for the written word
and a fretful lack of time. I'm the author of Salvation, a piece of literary
fiction wrapped in a vampire story, and Benjamin, a story of love, loss, and
psychedelic drugs due to be released next month.
These days, you can find my poetry
and prose all over the place. Check out my website for a full list of published
works!
I figured the best way to talk
about myself too much without feeling like I was talking about myself too much
was to let you guys ask the questions. This author interview was compiled by my
friends, fans, and wordweaving colleagues - thanks so much to all of them!
"What inspires you the most
when writing?" Kirstie Herrington
I think the one thing that has always inspired me the most is humanity; the human experience, the human condition, the polarities between our deepest emotions. There is something so compelling about pure humanity - it is what gives a story meaning. Romances, tragedies, and even horror, they're all about humanity. Even in a story like Watership Down, where rabbits are the key players and humans appear only as shadows in the background, it is still the rabbits' humanity that draws us into their tale. We wouldn't empathize with those rabbits if they were simply rabbits. We love them because they act like humans. Because they're people, with families and feelings and lives. And that's what inspires me the most.
It's human feelings that inspire me to write, human experiences, but not just my own. It's almost as if my own pain is too close to be seen quite clearly. It's so much more beautiful to observe someone else's pain from across the room, some pain that I can see but can't quite understand, and to appropriate it. To distill some other life in the labyrinthian corridors of my own mind, and find a new world waiting on the other side.
