I’m writing a short story in the form of an interview. It’s fiction. Here’s an excerpt:

Much of your work is built around juxtapositions, a classic example being the story “C-130.” How did this style evolve?

My earliest story attempts were rip-offs of Amy Hempel. I’d take her stories and then rewrite them using different settings, different situations, but basically just copying the way her characters’ motivations / emotional states “saturated” every line. They were terrible.

“C-130” was an experiment in using this same concept, only exporting the subtext from characters’ interactions and dialogue to the associations a reader would create in his or her mind through various juxtapositions. It was a way of writing “cinematically.”

In Argentina we have all these Ford Falcons. They were the vehicles used by the militares during the disappearances. But it’s not like after the dictatorship ended these cars went away. They’re all over the country, sold from one person to the next. I was traveling through Patagonia–a little town called Esquel–and I saw a Ford Falcon driven by this old campesino. So I just started inventing the history of this car. Each little scene–the mechanics assembling it in Buenos Aires, the militar driving it home and then taking his wife for a ride, the officers putting blindfolded prisoners in the backseat, the vehicle being sold, then sold again in a different province, and then sold again to this campesino and him using it to drive up into the mountains each day–I “saw” all this suddenly and wrote it and it felt different than the Hempel style. I didn’t think about it this way at the time but the whole structure is really a way of leveraging dramatic irony. The reader always knows more than the characters.

“C-130” and pretty much all the stories in that collection use the same “template.” I grew up in Marietta, Georgia, which is the suburbs of Atlanta. There was a plant there–Lockheed Dobbins–that produced the C-130 airplanes used all over the world, including by Fuerza Aerea Argentina to throw desaparecidos into the Rio de la Plata. I saw a kid skateboarding one day in Marietta. He stopped for a second and watched as a C-130 flew really low–it was landing at Lockheed–and I just started seeing that story–the kid, the plane, the pilot, the same pilot but 20 years earlier delivering the plane to Argentina, the kid just being born, a young Argentine couple with their newborn.