Astonished Dice

In preparation for Geoff Cochrane's Astonished Dice, collected short fiction release, we gave him a list of questions to answer. He arrived for coffee one Tuesday morning with the below typed sheet. The questions became irrelevant. Herewith, the answers:

Less is more. Though Hemingway's brand of simplicity can be a bit of a con, less is always more. And my history of addiction to alcohol (my very own 'backstory') is a gift that just keeps on giving.
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My work has been described as 'dirty and miraculous'. And Michael Morrissey had this to say: '(Cochrane's) prose frequently does what we hope drugs will do–present things in the now, in a different light.'
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Anne Carson is mad or plays at being mad. Anne Carson does exactly what she likes, producing thus a radiant derangement. The youth at night would have himself driven around the scream. It lay in the middle of the city gazing back at him with its heat and rose-pools of flesh. Terrific lava shone on his soul. He would ride and stare.
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Some books of short stories seem as substantial as Middlemarch. They're more than the sum of their parts, somehow. They have a heft out of all proportion to their actual size, and they leave one with an impression of coherent incoherence. I'm thinking here of Barthelme's Amateurs or Tobias Wolff's The Night in Question. E.L. Doctorow's Lives of the Poets would be another.
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As to the business of getting started on a story, I'll probably begin with some small thing I feel I can do justice to. A line of dialogue, a certain sort of weather, the look of a certain person or thing, a fragment of language crying out for a context. I'm likely to have a little stack of notes, a scrappy little stack of bits and pieces, and then there'll come a moment when these tatty little notes achieve critical mass and I can see a story in them. Three or four wispy wee notions will suddenly seem replete with possibilities.
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To put the above in a slightly different way, ONE NEEDS INGREDIENTS, AND THEY MUST BE GOOD INGREDIENTS.
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In my late teens and early twenties, having decided to become a some sort of writer, I practised moving words around within sentences, and then progressed to moving sentences around within paragraphs. What effect did I want, and how could I best achieve it? And thus I learned to FINISH WHAT I STARTED and not leave myself with a hellish mess to clean up later, a task which always proves to be well nigh impossible. Those 'teachers' of creative writing who instruct their would-be novelists to write a long first draft willy-fucking-nilly SHOULD BE TAKEN OUT AND SHOT.

Astonished Dice is on sale now.