Rivka Galchen on Choosing What Not to Abandon

“That’s my instinct— to not finish a project. I’ll start it with high hopes and lots of ideas and what seems like more than could possibly fit into something. And then I find that in a funny way, if I don’t have velocity on my side, I myself undergo too many changes to have the same interests. To read something, you have to be interested for like four hours. But to write something you have to be in for a year or a few years.”

Rivka Galchen is the author of Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch and is the recipient of a William Saroyan International Prize for Fiction and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, among other distinctions. She writes regularly for The New Yorker, whose editors selected her for their list of 20 Under 40 American fiction writers in 2010. Her debut novel Atmospheric Disturbances (2008) and her story collection American Innovations were both New York Times Best Books of the Year. She has received an MD from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.