Kevin Brockmeier’s fiction deftly, uncannily and poignantly treads the delicate lines that connect and separate fantasy and science fiction; dream and nightmare; fable and parable. Brockmeier grounds his fiction in reality, but turns reality inside-out or at least slightly askew, asking readers to look around ordinary corners into odd angles where small but potent revelations stand illuminated. In the touching novel, “The Truth about Celia,” for example, a father attempts to deal with his sorrow and guilt about the disappearance of his daughter by writing a series of widely divergent short stories in which she figures (more or less), only to find that the truth about Celia is more complicated than his imagination can grasp.

Brockmeier lives in Little Rock. His new collection of stories is “The View from the Seventh Layer” (Pantheon, $21.95). The author will be at Davis-Kidd Booksellers Tuesday at 6 p.m. to read from and sign the book. His previous efforts are the short story collection “Things That Fall from the Sky”; another novel “The Brief History of the Dead”; and the children’s books “City of Names” and “Grooves: A Kind of Mystery.” The store is at 387 Perkins Ext. in Laurelwood. Call 683-9801.

The following interview with Kevin Brockmeier, presented here in excerpts, was conducted by Corey Claireday, a student of creative nonfiction in the English department at the University of Memphis.

Corey Clairday: What’s a typical writing day like for you? What’s your routine?

Kevin Brockmeier: Well, I try to treat it as a regular job, so I wake up in the morning, I eat my breakfast, and I do my morning routines. And then I usually get started sometime around 9:30 or ten o’clock, keep writing into the late afternoon typically. And take breaks, do a little reading, or eat lunch, or do the dishes, or do something like that. And most often my day ends around four thirty or five o’clock, but sometimes if I feel I haven’t gotten enough done or if I still have enough mental energy, I’ll keep writing into the evening.

CC: So how much do you get written in a day typically?

KB: A good day for me is about a page. I’m the kind of writer who works very, very slowly. Sentence by sentence. Creeping forward and trying my best to perfect everything as I go along. A terrible way to work, but I just find myself mentally compelled to work that way.

CC: Some of your stories, a lot of them actually, experiment with form like The Truth About Celia and “The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device,” and I was wondering about your interest in experimentation of form in fiction.

KB: You know, I suppose more than anything else, it’s something that energizes my own imagination. I don’t know that I really have an aesthetic justification for it. When it’s something that strikes me an interesting new form, or at least new to me, occurs to me, I feel this burst of enthusiasm, and it’s always good to feel that when you’re sitting down to begin something. So it’s often the case when I begin a new piece of writing that I set myself some kind of formal challenge to keep the story’s muscles working.

CC: How much is research a part of your writing process?

KB: Relatively little for most of the books I’ve written. I tend to do piecemeal research as I’m going along. For instance, I’m working on a story right now in which a character has the upper portion of her thumb amputated, and so I’m kind of digging around online as I need to just to figure out what that medical procedure would be like and what her process of recuperation would look like. But most of the books I write don’t demand a lot of preliminary research. Even with The Brief History of the Dead which takes place half in the Antarctic, I read a couple of books about the Antarctic just to give myself a basic working knowledge of the landscape. There are writers who work much differently than this. I have friends who write historical fiction and some of them tell me that they’ll read hundreds of books before they sit down to begin working on a piece. I’ve always felt that for the kind of writing I do, I should do just enough research so that I don’t look like a total idiot to the people who really know the subject I’m writing about, but no more than that. That way you’ve got a little bit of something to work with, but you can allow your imagination to fill in all the rest of the details. I’m afraid that if I do too much research, I’ll feel the obligation to incorporate great gluts of information that don’t really have a natural place in the story.

CC: I’ve heard other authors talk about how they choose the order for their short stories to appear in a collection. I was wondering how you choose the order for your stories in the collections.

KB: Well, I do deliberate on it. In the case of the new collection it’s thirteen stories, four of which are these short little pieces with absurdly long titles, fables of one sort or another, and I wanted to stagger those throughout the collection. So what I have is the four fables, and in between each of them are three longer stories. My initial idea for the book was that it would progress from stories that were mostly fantastic to stories that were mostly realistic. And you can see a little bit of that progression in the collection as it now stands, but some of it fell by the wayside as I reshuffled things. The book as it now looks is like it looked when I initially submitted it to my editor, but he did suggest that I flip a couple of stories around, and the suggestion seemed smart to me so I followed them.

CC: Could you talk about how your interest in fairy tales and fantasy and science-fiction influences your writing?

KB: Yeah, I grew up reading an awful lot of fantasy and science-fiction. I read bits and pieces of classic fiction and literary fiction as I was growing up, mostly because I was assigned to read for class, but I didn’t really begin exploring that terrain of literature avidly until I was in college. So a large part of my reading background is made up of fantasy and sci-fi. Now the stuff I enjoyed when I was a kid isn’t the same fantasy and science-fiction I enjoy today, but I’m still discovering wonderful fantasy and science-fiction that seemed to me to offer every bit as much to a discriminating reader as the best literary fiction does. So I think a lot of my work combines an interest in the fantastic with an interest in the realistic. Certainly, the work of mine that’s gotten the most attention does that, and it never seemed obvious to me in any way that those are two fields of story-telling that need to have a hard and fast separation between them. One book that I guess was eye-opening for me when I was in college is a story collection by Peter Carey called The Fat Man in History, and it was one of the first works of contemporary literary fiction that I kind of stumbled upon on my own and was enraptured by. And one of the things I liked so much about that book was the way in which he incorporated elements of the fantastic into stories that were very clearly meant to be received as literature and also the great heart that was behind the stories and the great precision of language. All of that was eye-opening to me. And I started reading great volumes of recent literary fiction after I discovered that book.

CC: In “The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device” there’s a line about Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon and Arthur C. Clarke all practicing literature as a form of nostalgia, and it seems like some of your work is kind of nostalgic like “Andrea is Changing Her Name” and a lot of the stuff in Grooves, and I was wondering what role nostalgia plays for you in your writing.

KB: I guess I would say first nostalgia plays a large and perhaps regrettable role in my life. And because of that it plays a significant role in my writing. I just have my eye turned to the past an awful lot of the time. “Andrea is Changing Her Name” in particular is by far the most autobiographical story I have ever published. And it’s not that the material hasn’t been fictionalized. And some of it is flat speculation. But there’s also awful lot of my own experiences in there in a way that’s completely free of disguise. Whereas in a lot of the other stories I’ve written, you might find my own experiences, but unless you’ve actually lived through them with me it’s not the kind of stuff that a reader would pick up on right away.

CC: Sometimes you borrow characters like Rumpelstiltskin, Captain Kirk, and the girl from the National Geographic cover and make their narratives your own. I was wondering what your interest in doing that is.

KB: I hadn’t seen that until just now as a trend in my writing. I think I had a specific interest in each of those characters. The National Geographic photo, like a lot of people, I was really taken with that when I first saw it, and it’s kind of lingered in my head ever since. Rumpelstiltskin, of all the stuff that I published, that’s the earliest written piece. I wrote that when I was a senior in college, and that story was generated out of the Mad Libs passage, that came first. I wanted to find a way to write a Mad Libs story for adults somehow, and I couldn’t figure out a way to turn it into a whole story, but I had been reading an edition of the classic fairy tales while I was pondering this idea and it occurred to me that Rumpelstiltskin ends the story as half a human being and it might make sense to tie that into a Mad Libs passage, which is in some way half written. So that’s how that idea arose. And then the Captain Kirk thing: the story’s dedicated to a friend of mine Justin Turner, and Justin and I have a long-standing joke about confusing the great Russian short story writer and playwright Anton Chekov with Star Trek ensign Pavel Chekov. It’s such a ridiculous idea but I couldn’t get it out of my head. And eventually I decided I need to write this story and see if I can turn it into something. So I combined Anton Chekov’s best known story “The Lady with the Pet Dog” with the Star Trek episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” to see what I could do. And it’s still a ridiculous idea but I was pretty happy with the way the story turned out. It seemed to me to have more heart to it than I imagined it would when I began writing it.