Alison Stine

Alison Stine is the author of TRASHLANDS (MIRA Books, October 26, 2021) and ROAD OUT OF WINTER (MIRA Books), which won the 2021 Philip K. Dick Award. She writes regularly for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others, and has received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship. After growing up in rural Ohio, where she lived for most of her adult life, she now lives in Colorado with her partner and son.

Twitter: @AlisonStine

Instagram: @alistinewrites

Is there a genre of music that influences your writing/thinking? Do you listen to music while you write?

I do listen to sounds when I write, but not music. Ambient noise or nature sounds help me concentrate, I think because they remind me of home: sounds like crickets, wind, rain, campfires crackling or leaves crunching.

Favorite non-reading activity?

Going into the woods on hikes or adventures. I come from a long line of foragers, including both my grandfathers who foraged mushrooms and plants to supplement their farming incomes. Even when I’m just out in the mountains with my family, I’m always looking around, seeing if maybe there’s something to snack on. Foraging can really connect you to where you are, and to the seasons. It’s almost fall here, so we found plums the last time when my family went hiking, and even in the city, we have so many crabapple trees and mulberries.

Is there another profession you would like to try?

I wish I hadn’t stopped performing. I used to write music and perform it. But this world makes you choose. And if you’re disabled, or queer, or a parent, or all of the above, your choices are slimmer. Writing is, in some ways, an easier choice for me because I can do it alone, write when my son goes to sleep without waking him up. I don’t need special equipment or a band or a stage. I still write songs. It’s just no one hears them. My dream one day is to write a novel where the main character is a songwriter, and maybe compose and record a tie-in album, even if only for my friends.

What do you worry about?

There’s so much to worry about right now, it’s more like what don’t we worry about? I’m concerned about what we’re doing to the planet. I worry about the world my child is inheriting. I worry about where all this plastic is going to go. TRASHLANDS is, in some regards, a way for me to deal with that worry--and to turn it into hope.

What could we do with what we have? What could we make with it? How could we still live—even in a world of trash and plastic and ruin, a world that in many respects we gave up on? How could we not just survive, but thrive as much possible, and help each other, and love? What would the art look like? Could someone—a woman—still make it?

Do you speak a second language? Do you think differently in that language? Does it influence your writing?

I know some sign language. I’m partially deaf, and have been since I was born, but like many deaf and Hard of Hearing children I had no access to sign language growing up. I read lips and hear some, but the isolation of the pandemic is helping me realize I need to learn more about my own culture, which includes learning more sign language. My partner is Chicano, so my child can communicate some in Spanish and ASL as well as in English. Lack of access to language is a part of my story, and definitely feeling like—even being told by adults when I was young—that I am between the hearing and Deaf worlds is a big part of why I write. I’m trying to make sense of it, to find a place where I belong. To write that world.