It’s always tough for me to remember the precise origin of a story after I finish it, but for Caro’s Return, there’s certainly an influence from Jorge Luis Borges, whose work I first read and admired in college—all those fabulist stories told with faux gravitas and sprinkled with his trademark references and footnotes, delightfully obscure because they were often invented.

In Caro’s Return, it seems that I’ve looked more toward Borges’s “confessional” tales, penned by men in dire circumstances, such as The Garden of Forking Paths.

I would say, too, that the that fantasy of meeting a character, whether one of my own or someone else’s, has been an enduring one. When I was younger and appearing on stage in community theater productions, I envied playwrights (I still do)—they get to see their creations up close, in the flesh. Adding to the thrill, the characters’ actions are not entirely under their creator’s control. The podcast of my story comes pretty close to that experience, and forms a kind of circle: listening to one of my characters describe an encounter with one of his.

I am a tuba player, and perform regularly with an orchestra in Manhattan, as well as with a tuba quartet.

The first adult books I remember reading as a child, around the age of 11, were the espionage thrillers of Alistair MacLean, all coming from my mother, who would check them out of the library. I loved their action, twists, betrayals, femme fatales, and the sardonic narrators. These days, I will occasionally revisit one of MacLean’s earlier (better) novels, mostly to be entertained by his plotting. I actually had MacLean in mind when creating the central character (and his oeuvre) for Caro’s Return.

I don’t laugh much, I have to admit, but when I do it’s usually from something quirky and unexpected. Recently I signed up for a year’s subscription to The Criterion Channel, and discovered an Italian film I’d never seen before, by a director I didn’t know— Luis García Berlanga’s The Executioner, a delightful dark comedy I didn’t realize was a comedy until it made me laugh with its (literal) gallows humor. It was exactly what I needed for my Covid anxiety—not comfort (I’m tired of comfort) but something that matched my edgy mood.

After the years I spent writing and revising my novel To Zenzi, after all the hours spent going over the digital proofs (and the corrections), I was finally able to hold in my hands a printed galley copy of the book. It arrived in a package in mid-December of 2020, and I thought at first it was another Christmas gift sent to me by a friend or relative for a holiday we needed to celebrate separately for health reasons.

It sat under the tree for several days until it occurred to me what it was. Feeling its heft, seeing the wonderful cover, and riffling through the pages was pure happiness.