I am shamelessly influenced by whomever I am reading at the moment, but I have found this is not something to fear, for the influence is only a prod in a direction, and the way I get there winds up being my own. At the time I wrote "The Waiting Room" I was full of the images and weather of a period of time spent in Paris, and I was also under the spell of the work of writer Mavis Gallant. Her work casts a particular, dreamlike density of atmosphere, and under the spell of that density, I set out to tell my tale.