Michael Shum

Interview with Christi Craig: “One of my goals in writing the novel was to enchant the experience of gambling, a topic that is often disenchanted when it comes to fiction (think gritty tales of realism that describe down on their luck protagonists getting more and more in the hole…). I wanted to do the opposite with my novel, which is to invest aspects of real-life experience with, as you say, curiosity and mystery—to enchant those experiences, in other words. So yes, I did pull from real-life people I’ve come across—for example, the Countess is a very stylized and enchanted version of a regular who used to come to the casino where I worked every day, an old woman who sat at the poker table coughing up a lung and glaring at the other players. Her name was Barbara, by the way, so the character of Barbara was a kind of reimagining of this player when she was young, in the 1980s.”
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Interview with Qwillery: “Although I didn’t know it was research at the time, I spent over two years working as a poker dealer in a small cardroom in Lake Stevens, Washington, learning the ins and outs of what goes on behind the scenes.”
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Interview with Victoria Fullard: “The danger of logic and reason is that if you rely on them as a default, you become less attuned to your own natural sense of things—how do you make decisions when there is great uncertainty and incomplete knowledge? Perhaps one important life skill is learning what situations favor which.”
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