Siobhan Carroll grew up in Canada and (briefly) Saudi Arabia, where she developed a taste for international travel that will no doubt serve her well in her villainous quest for world domination. When not trekking through exotic lands or building armies of superbots she is hard at work writing her dissertation at Indiana University. In her nonexistent free time she dances, sketches, and consumes more media than is good for her. Her fiction has been published in magazines like Realms of Fantasy, On Spec, and Son & Foe, but so far this has not appeased her desire to conquer the multiverse.

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Tell me a little about The Nest Building Habits of Children Inclined to Ornithomancy and Other Such Auguries. What was the first image or phrase or impetus that made you sit down and spin it out?

Many of my stories simply begin with that ubiquitous, “What if?” “What if in contemporary society there was a subculture of ornithomancers?” So, yeah, it’s high on the weird radar, but that’s right up my alley. The answer really came in the first sentence: “By the time I was four, my father began teaching me the subtleties of reading crow flight — most other birds, too.” Now, that particular sentence came to me while writing a totally unrelated short story. The idea, the image of a father and son, the fragmented memoir of the nameless narrator all gelled so fast for me that I had to stop mid-stream on that other story to write “The Nest Building Habits of Children Inclined to Ornithomancy and Other Such Auguries.” And the sucker spun me out.

Where do you get your ideas?

Finding the fantastic in the everyday. I want to see one of the Fey Folk in the shadows of a few acres of planted pines. See Celtic triptychs swirled in the dust of a dirt road. Watch some crows light in the trees across the road from my property and wonder… The ideas mostly come as images. Sometimes a snippet of dialogue. Again, in this particular story’s genesis, a first sentence. The ones that start with a last sentence are the most fun to me, though.

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The Plagiarist had many lives before reaching its current state. Originally, I’d written it as part of a novel — a kind of intertextual detective story — which ultimately went nowhere. So I lobbed off my favorite parts of the ill-conceived crime novel and crafted them into stand-alone short stories. My favorite section involved a character hired to follow a woman whose husband had suspected her of adultery, only as the man follows her through the apparently mundane activities of her day, he finds himself entering and re-entering a series of narratives which may or may not have been written by the same jealous husband. Anyway, that soon became vertiginous and impossibly convoluted, so I scaled it down further and further until it reached its current state: man finds magical book on subway. At the time, I’d been very influenced by Cynthia Ozick’s marvelous (and totally neglected) novel, The Messiah of Stockholm, which is about a bookseller searching for the lost manuscript of Bruno Schultz — in real life, the greatest fabulist writer of mid-century Poland.

Where do you get your ideas?

Usually, they begin as a form of plagiarism. Really. I fall in love with books — usually non-fiction books — and attempt to emulate them. I do so clumsily, and eventually fail, and the failure becomes something of a model for a first draft. My hypertext novel, Synapse,was borne of a failed attempt to recreate Don DeLillo’s White Noise by way of Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood. My story collection, The Musical Illusionist, was a stab at recasting the Museum of Jurassic Technology in LA as a work of fiction. Jonathan Lethem published a ingenious essay in Harper’s last year about plagiarism; I defer to him on the subject.

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