What made you decide to write a book based on what happens when a family wins the lottery?
I actually had a dream about it! I dreamed that I was with some family in Brunswick and they had just won the lottery, and I felt it incumbent on me to persuade them to give away everything to charity or their lives would be ruined. I woke up from the dream, and I felt strange and ugly but also knew that I had the germ of a novel. I was passionately interested in this idea of what happens when sudden wealth appears anywhere; how demons spring up and how the only thing that will defeat those demons is some kind of pure love. It felt like this powerful elemental story unfolding itself before me.
Do you play the lottery?
I have on occasion just for fun. Once I threw balls at kewpie dolls and I won a big teddy bear that I brought home to my mother—I think that’s the only thing I can ever remember winning.
I was struck by the ease with which the two crooks managed to overtake the family by posing as lottery officials. In your research, did you come across any reallife situations like this?
The real-life situations are not about someone robbing or extorting lottery winnings, but I did read a lot about winners themselves and the kind of hell they went through after the lottery. It’s amazing to see how people’s lives, in so many cases, would just dissolve after they won a big jackpot. I guess it’s predictable:When you win all this money, it makes an absolute mockery of everything you’ve done in your life, and it also makes you lonely because you can never trust anyone around you. It amazes me how quickly people’s lives can unravel.
What was the appeal of placing the story in small-town Georgia?
I’ve been particularly drawn to the South in the last few years. I’ve been living in New York for many years, but I keep an apartment in Savannah. I like to go back, particularly to Brunswick. It’s kind of an ugly little town on the coast, but I love it. My next book will be set in Savannah.
Have you started that?
I don’t’ want to say much except that some of it involved the famous storm-drain system under the city and it involves obsessive love, which is a theme that I’m always drawn to.
There’s a lot of modern music in Ravens— Santigold, Bat for Lashes—what were you listening to while you wrote?
I know all this music, but I was listening to a lot of Bulgarian music at the time. Very haunted Romanian and Bulgarian contemporary folk music. It was a very different kind of sound.When Romeo drives around and around the city, it can be a very lonely town, especially on hot days when the streets are deserted, and for some time I would drive around and lose myself in these haunted ballads. It just felt as though I needed something to help jigger the loneliness.
It’s just that those bands really peg Tara, who’s listening to them, as a specific kind of girl.
That’s the point. People think of Tara, my heroine, as being kind of a redneck girl, but she really isn’t. She comes from a workingclass Brunswick family, but she’s somewhat enlightened. All these kids down in Brunswick, depending on different groups, there are a lot of kids who like more of a folk, old-timey sound, but Tara runs with a gang that’s a little wilder than that.
You started The Moth. How has your involvement with that influenced your own writing?
To me, literature and The Moth are two very separate disciplines.The Moth demands that the raconteur uses the vernacular and speaks to us in a conversational tone that goes right into our heart. I love the use of heightened language, and so there are big differences between the way I would write a story and the way I would tell it. I do think there are certain elemental principals of storytelling that every writer should know, instinctually and emotionally.
> Ravens
By George Dawes Green, Grand Central Publishing, 336 pages.
