KC: Wow, I cannot do any of those things. 

DL: Well, you know, winter is when I really exercise—when I’m leading up to that big windsurfing trip in Bonaire. So essentially, I’m training right now to get into shape, because to windsurf every day for five hours a day for two weeks, it takes a lot out of your body. So I always need to get back into shape for that.

KC: So, it’s like, a winter training ritual…

DL: Yeah, yeah.

KC: What do you like to wear? I feel like I always see you in black on black.

DL: I wear a lot of black, but I should dress better.

KC: You dress—you dress very well.

DL: I dress well when I go to conferences or when I’m doing something in public, but when I’m home, I’m basically like—for instance, I’m in shorts, t-shirts, and flip-flops all summer long. And you know, my father lives in Hawaii and I go back for two weeks to Oahu every Christmas, and I have this thing where I don’t want to wear long pants or shoes for the entire two weeks. It’s not a very fashionable look at all, but during sort of professional engagements, I try to dress a little bit better.

KC: When we’re talking t-shirts, do you mean they have ridiculous slogans or like Bart Simpson—

DL: No, no, no but I’ve been going—the last two summers, I’ve been going to Marfa, Texas. I went first there for the Lannan Residency and then, I went back. I loved it so much, and I was getting so much work done, that I went back and rented a house. So I have a lot of Marfa t-shirts. They have this great food truck called the Food Shark, and so I’ve got several t-shirts from them. And then they have a bookstore where they make t-shirts; I have a lot of different t-shirts from them. But I also have a lot of surf wear t-shirts—Quiksilver and that sort of thing.

KC: Is this like skintight, neoprene, fluorescent pink kind of stuff?

DL: Well, I do have rash-guards, but I only wear those when I’m actually windsurfing. I don’t wear them on the street or anything. (Laughs)

KC: Do you have a special writing chair? Can you describe it?

DL: I have a really sort of bad cheapo chair that I bought from Staples. I’ve been scouting chairs, you know, like Aeron chairs and various Herman Miller chairs, but I haven’t gotten around to getting one yet. But what I end up doing is, every hotel I go to, if I think, “This is a nice chair,” I flip it over and take a photo of the label and then I take a photo of the chair and think, “Maybe I’ll order this chair.” But I never do.

KC: How many photos do you have like that?

DL: Uh, probably about a dozen or something. I still haven’t bought a new chair, and I have this sort of superstition now that maybe it’s this chair, this generic Staples brand, that has been good for me—and if I change, it may not go so well.

KC: What food or drink do you consume the most?

DL: Well, you know, as far as drink, it’s definitely coffee and I used to always get, like, Starbucks house blend. But now, I just get Peet’s at the grocery store, or Seattle’s Best or something. But yeah, I’ll drink three quarters of a pot every morning. As far as food goes, I make a lot of stir fries for myself. I’m constantly looking for recipes by chefs that they make for themselves when they go home. It’s usually stuff that they have already in their pantry and that they can make very quickly. One of them is simply olive oil that you heat up—you put garlic in it, you get it to be really fragrant, and then, you put in anchovy filets and get them to melt, and also capers, and then you just toss in pasta and parsley and parmesan and you’ve got a great meal. Even simpler than that, another pasta recipe, this is just what chefs do—all you do is melt butter in the pan and you put parmesan in there and a little bit of the pasta water and toss in the pasta and the salt and pepper. It’s really good. It’s that simple—I’m always looking for dishes that are really good but simple.

KC: That sounds great. Do you want to say a few words about The Collective?  

DL: Yeah, so, it’s my fourth book and third novel. You know, the funny thing about this book is that it comes from a failure when I had started another book. I had wanted to do something different, wanted to write from the first person female point of view. So it was about a drug-addicted suicidal female poet amputee who is stalking her Cambridge neighbor. I actually charted out the entire novel, wrote the first thirty pages, and gave it to my agent and my editor. I even gave a reading from it and it all went over very well, and my agent and editor said, “Yeah, go with it.” I knew that it was a solid book that could work, but I just did not want to write this book, so eventually, I tossed it. It was a huge decision because I spent about nine months on this, doing all kinds of research about amputees. So I was just sitting there and thinking, man, what am I gonna do? Maybe I’m never going to write another book. Then, I just started The Collective. I took three pages from the other book and started The Collective and still, I didn’t think I had a novel. I was really worried about it when I got that Lannan Residency to go to Marfa. I remember distinctly flying to Texas and thinking, this could be an utter disaster—I’m going to be in Marfa for six weeks and it could be that I have to walk out into the desert, because this thing is not going to fly at all. But the first day I was in Marfa, I figured out the rest of the novel and just started and pretty much finished a draft of the novel by the end of my six weeks there. It’s about three artists—two writers and a painter—who meet in college and then reunite ten years later in Boston. They form an organization called the 3AC, the Asian American Artists Collective, and get into all kinds of trouble.

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Don Lee’s newest novel is The Collective. He is also the author of the novels Wrack and Ruin and Country of Origin and the story collection Yellow. He is currently the director of the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. www.don-lee.com.