Robin Lippincott is the author of three novels, In the Meantime (Toby Press, 2007), Our Arcadia: An American Watercolor (Viking, 2001, Penguin 2002) and Mr. Dalloway (Sarabande Books, 1999, now in its fourth printing), and a collection of short stories, The Real, True Angel (Fleur-de-Lis Press, 1996, 1999). His fiction has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the American Library Association Roundtable Award, the Independent Book Award, and the Lambda Literary Award. He is a multiple Yaddo fellow as well as a fellow of the MacDowell Colony. His fiction and nonfiction has also appeared in The Paris Review, Fence, American Short Fiction, The New York Times Book Review, The Literary Review, The American Voice, Provincetown Arts, The Louisville Review, The Bloomsbury Review, and many other journals as well as the anthologies M2M: New Literary Fiction, Rebel Yell and Rebel Yell 2. He teaches in the Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program at Spalding University and at Harvard University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Can you remember the moment when you thought up the characters or the plot for In the Meantime?

It wasn’t a moment so much as it was an accumulation of moments, which is usually the case with me. And then of course as I write the moments coalesce and collide, grow and change…. I started writing the novel just days before September 11. 2001, and I can tell you that it changed dramatically because of it. (read on…)

That yard was out to get me: to make me pay for his neglect. I’d cared too much about the inside and, jealous, possessive, he’d lost his muddy mind. I’d been keeping my eyes up, you know; worrying too much over the above-ground happenings: erratic employment, broken family, troubled friends and their alcohol-fueled urges to star on the nightly news. (read on…)