Q. How did this story come about?

Last summer my wife and I went back to Sweden, where she worked for a couple months and I stayed home with our boys. We borrowed a little studio apartment from some friends who were in the process of moving and let us use their old place, which was really generous. But the place was tiny. It had what’s called a “Stockholm shower,” which is when the bathroom is the shower, like on a sailboat. In these sorts of showers, it’s possible to sit on the toilet and wash your hair at the same time, which is, OK, aside the point, but still: what a thing this was! Anyway, every morning my wife would get up to go to work and I’d get up early with her and write until the boys woke up. Then we’d eat breakfast, and play a game or build train tracks or whatever until around ten, when the one year old would go down for his nap. By this time the four year old would be getting a little stir crazy, which is a problem I faced with the kind of parenting they created those nanny reality shows to correct. I turned on the television.

Q. What music would you pair this story with?

I don’t normally write to music. It distracts me too much. But in this case, it was either listen to my own music or listen to the theme songs from dubbed British kid’s shows for an hour. It was an easy call. My musical tastes are pretty narrow. I basically only listen to punk rock from the 70s and 80s, which is the same music I’ve been listening to for a long time. One of my favorite bands is a Swedish band from this period called Ebba Grön. Think The Clash, but sloppier and more fun. They have a song called Jag tittar på tv which translates as “I’m watching TV.” The song is pretty intensely political. It’s about the Cold War and, typical for a punk rock song, there’s a good mix of apathy and outrage. Admittedly, none of my stories are about either politics or the Cold War, but whenever I hear this song, I always think of that summer, sitting at the dining table in a tiny apartment, trying to write while my son watched TV.

I wrote a draft of “Peafowl” during this time. It started, like a lot of my stories do, with an image. This time it was a peacock, which is a bird that I have always been interested in. There’s a zoo-type place in Stockholm called Skansen, where the peacocks—both blue and white—roam free. I took the boys there a few times over the summer and every time I saw one of the peacocks I got to thinking about whether it would possible to get one of my own. Apart from the honking and screeching, they seem like pretty interesting birds. Once, I was walking down a path and a peacock jumped out from behind a bush and honked at me. My wife actually caught the exact moment of the honk with her camera—you can see the evidence here. It was terrifying. But it was also hilarious. I think peacocks (not unlike my wife) must have a good sense of humor. Unfortunately, I’m way too indecisive and lazy to ever do anything like the narrator of this story did.

Q. What makes fiction necessary for you?

This is a tough question. I guess there are two ways to think about it. Do you mean what makes fiction necessary for me as a person who writes it? Or what makes fiction necessary, in my opinion, for readers, for society i.e. how does it fulfill some kind of social or cultural purpose? For me, it seems intuitively true that fiction is necessary to our culture(s), to our communities, etc. I mean, I think this is a bigger question than we have room for here, but undeniably, fiction has served and continues to serve a social function, to communicate, to resist and inform. Perhaps this is most especially true for historically underrepresented groups, but I think it’s probably true just generally true, as well.

But to make the question about me: fiction is made necessary for me because I like it. I like reading it. I like writing it. I like thinking and talking about it. I like teaching it. I think as soon as I stop having fun writing fiction, I probably won’t write it anymore. There is a thrill unlike any other in spending an hour on a sentence. It’s the thing that will get me up early and keep me writing through kid’s TV shows and loud punk rock music and hot sweaty summer days and four year olds begging to go to the park. This is a total non-answer. I don’t know. The necessity of fiction—that is, that thing that keeps it necessary for me as a writer of it—is enjoyment. More than likely, other people will have brainier, more complete, answers than this. But for me, that’s it. I get an awful lot of pleasure from making sentences and then following them to a satisfying end. I’m certainly not saying that this is fiction’s ultimate purpose. No doubt there is some higher accomplishment of narrative, but personally, the necessity of fiction lies solely in my own enjoyment of it.