Q. What was the inspiration for this story?

A. I grew up in a tiny little town in central rural Michigan, a kind of post-industrial, post-industrial agriculture kind of place, where working-class meant you’d made it in life and rough was the norm. It’s a place with a lot of odd juxtapositions. There’s a lot of white poverty manifesting itself in its usual ways — obesity, disease, alcoholism and prescription drug addiction, child and wife abuse, derelict trailer parks, junk strewn lawns. There’s also, oddly, a huge Amish population. There’s a lot of pristine nature, large tracts of forest, but there’s also a lot of fucked up industrial pollution (the lake my hometown sits on has been dead, mostly dead, or dying for the last 50 years). Your dad either commutes to a factory (or did) or farms (or did). Your mom could’a done better and everyone in your family knows it. Church on Sunday. High school educations at best. High rates of military service, incarceration or institutionalization. Guns, god and country. Crop dusters in the sky. High tension power lines, silos and steel sided barns. It’s that kind of place. “Leroy Knows Things” is one of many pieces in which I write about this place and its experiences.

Q. What music would you pair this story with?

A. I’d pair this piece with Mogwai’s song I Know You Are But What Am I off their album Happy Songs For Happy People.

Q. Why is fiction necessary for you?

A. Storytelling is necessary for me because without stories we wouldn’t have anything. Everything we have ever known or think we’ve known, everything we will ever know or think to know was, is, and will be the product of storytelling.