The Art of Crafting a Novel: In Conversation with Laurie Sheck
Laurie Sheck’s latest novel, Cyborg Fever (Tupelo Press, 2025), is a lyrical exploration of loneliness, identity, and the self in an age of hyper-exposure to technology and information.
Divided into three parts, the novel follows an orphaned boy, Erwin, who, in a fever-dream state of consciousness, witnesses another man, Funes, and his compulsive web searches as he attempts to escape his own reality. The second part shifts to a cyborg who tells Erwin the story of his escape from a lab and the life he once lived inside it. Blending fictional narrative with scientific fact and archival fragments, Cyborg Fever reveals how the characters’ identities are shaped—and at times destabilized—by their interactions with knowledge. A powerful and formally innovative novel, it questions how we perceive truth, memory, and selfhood in a technologized world.
Sheck sat down with Camilla Marchese Gonzalez to share the writing process and inspiration behind her latest novel.
What sparked the idea to write this book?
I am interested in the place where fiction and nonfiction meet, and in the writer as a curator who can gather facts in meaningful ways and make them an integral part of the novel. My first novel, A Monster’s Notes, incorporated a lot of facts about Frankenstein and Mary Shelley, and my second, Island of the Mad, involved itself with Dostoevsky and the Venetian plague, so for this new one I identified new areas of fascination I wanted to explore—and over time those areas came to include bioengineering, cyborgs, and astrophysics. I like learning and I learned a lot. But whatever facts I use need to be grounded emotionally in the text; as I write I experience how they are integral to my characters’ deepest vulnerabilities, identities, and needs.
Cyborg Fever weaves fiction and nonfiction together using scientific facts and archival material. How did you go about curating what knowledge to include, and what guided your choices?
I try to find facts that are truly interesting, resonant, surprising, beautiful and sometimes deeply unsettling. Astrophysics, bioengineering—any area of knowledge can be presented in a way that’s dull or in a way that’s exciting. I look for the odd angle in. So when, for example, I find that there is an exoplanet whose surface is the texture of cotton candy, or that an astronaut played golf on the moon, or that an artist cloned his DNA with the DNA of a petunia—I note those things. Certain facts I knew I wanted to include from the get-go—My narrator is traumatized and in a year-long fever and in that fever he believes he is traveling through outer space—so facts about outer space became central to the work right away.
Though written in the first person, much of what we learn about the characters comes through how they observe others. How did you think about using observation as a narrative device, and how did it challenge or expand your sense of first-person storytelling?
I am interested in loneliness, tenderness and empathy. By having my characters aware of each other but unable to interact in the normal sense of the word, I am able to explore these ideas and feelings which are very important to me—to create relationships that involve both unbridgeable distance and intimate connection, attachment and isolation. In the book, each character who observes another is unable to directly impact the other’s fate or save that other from tragedy or pain. And yet a deep sense of caring comes through. As for storytelling, I began my writing life as a lyric poet—I wrote five books of poems before I ever wrote a novel—and I never thought of storytelling as one of my strengths or talents. I still don’t. I am not so much interested in story as in creating a container, a small universe of thought and feeling, an atmosphere in which explorations of various sorts can occur. A certain amount of plot is needed to hold the whole thing together, but really what I want is to create a space for my own investigations, and a space in which my characters can come into being. There are many ways to make a fiction. Storytelling is one way. Too often it is thought of as the only way. It is not.
Did anything surprise you—either about the characters or your own writing—as the novel evolved?
Yes! Very much so. Robert Frost said, ‘No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” I see my books very much as adventures—I experience them that way in the writing. I was over 100 pages in before I even knew I would have a cyborg as a character or that I would explore bioengineering. The Cyborg simply appeared to me one day, as in a visitation. I wrote a page and he was there—I could feel his essence very deeply, could feel him speaking—and I immediately felt very attached to him, very invested. Another character who came to mean a lot to me is Laika, the first dog to be sent into outer space, who also didn’t appear until late in the book. My experience has been that when I am writing from the deepest, most curious and emotionally true place within myself, all sorts of felicitous surprises come. The text is wise, it leads to what it needs. But the getting there is often arduous and can feel like blindness for a long time.
How do you see the relationship between writing and technology evolving? Do you think the accessibility of information is changing how we form ideas or construct narrative?
This is a big question, and an important one. In Cyborg Fever, I present two different kinds of information—one is the kind that’s connected to awe and wonder: What is the universe made of? What is time and space? How did the first astronauts describe the moon?; the second is more chilling: the glut of information we get every day on our phones and computers, the sense that we are drowning in it. In Cyborg Fever, the Cyborg, who has been the unwilling subject of biomedical experimentation, finds in the end, that against his will he is turning into an unfeeling information machine, he is spewing all sorts of data and statistics, all removed from any sense of who he is, from any feeling. Technology holds both promise and threat. Look at the current debates about AI—Chat GPT etc., and how it is affecting our thinking, writing, communication. We are at the very beginning of a world-changing revolution. The capabilities of AI have grown by leaps and bounds in just these last few years. What we know is that it is consequential and will be more and more so, but in what specific ways, and to what costs and benefits, are still mostly speculation. In the area of medicine, it is easy to see how enormously helpful it can be. But when it comes to the arts, the landscape is more complicated. One of the many things writers can do is be alert and bear witness.
Laurie Sheck is the author of three hybrid fictions: Island of the Mad (2016), Monster’s Notes (2009), and Cyborg Fever (2025). A Monster’s Notes was nominated for the International DUBLIN Literary Award and was named one of the 10 Best Fictions of the Year by Entertainment Weekly. She has also written five books of poems one of which, The Willow Grove, was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her essays have appeared online in The Paris Review, Granta, The Atlantic, and Bill Moyers & Company. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and has twice been awarded fellowships from the NEA. She is also a recipient for a Creative Capital Award in 2023. Her work has been reviewed in such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Boston Review, and The New Yorker. In spring 2012 she was Sidney Harman Distinguished Visiting Writer in Residence at Baruch College, CUNY, and has taught as well at Rutgers, Princeton, and Columbia. She is currently a member of the core MFA Writing Faculty at the New School and lives in New York City.
This interview series is produced by Camilla Marchese Gonzalez.