This Week in Fiction: Dorthe Nors: The New Yorker This week's story, "The Heron," is set in Frederiksberg Gardens, in Copenhagen. Have you spent much time in the gardens? When did you think about setting a story there? I lived close to Frederiksberg Gardens for seven years and I went there almost every day. I never calculated using the park as a setting, though. It was seeing one of the garden's many herons sitting on a park bench that did something to me. It just sat there condemned to oblivion and ready to drop dead. The heron that gives the story its title is, in the narrator's view, an unimpressive creature up close. What does the narrator's opinion of the heron allow you to reveal about the person telling us this story? Well, as mentioned, the heron that inspired me looked really sad and also somewhat ridiculous. Or maybe it just looked a little bit like Death itself (that is if Death can look ridiculous). I believe it gives the narrator a sense of power to be able to look at Death and call it unimpressive. The narrator is an older man, you see, and I think Death - which has nothing to do in a picturesque park! - is gaining on him. The story takes a seemingly pastoral setting and reveals its grimier side - the herons are skinny and sullen, alcoholics have taken up residence at one end of the park, while stony-faced mothers wheel baby carriages past the wrecked bicycles that litter the shores of Damhus Pond. Could you have sent another character into the park on the same day and come up with a very different fictional perspective on it? Definitely! Danes claim to be the happiest people on the face of the earth, and hardcore happiness takes place in Frederiksberg Gardens on a daily basis. I could easily have described people playing soccer, throwing birthday parties, having picnics, and eating ice cream. It's very idyllic and neat. But as a writer it's fun to take a look at the things that live in the shadow. The things that people condemned to happiness would prefer to have removed from the picture. Not only the alcoholics, the sick birds, and the violent incidents - but also Death and other inconvenient stuff. The great flocks of mothers circling the pond are another species the narrator has little sympathy for. Did you always know your narrator would harbor such vehement feelings about their possible fate? Or were you surprised by the turn you found the story taking as you were writing it? Oh, I was surprised. I'm quite often surprised by what I write. About the exploding mothers: even though I am a younger woman myself, I am a little scared of women in the so-called "mother groups." I like the support they offer each other, but meeting them when they are out walking together is like meeting the Valkyries. You don't mess with them. You just get out of their way. I think it's the power of motherhood paired with the extreme competition between the mothers in the group that cooks up something bad in them (that and the enormous amount of cake that women eat in those groups). I didn't plan to have them explode, though. But BOOM, off they went. The story appears in your collection, "Karate Chop," which has been translated by Martin Aitken, and will be published in America early next year. It's the first of your six books to appear in English. What's it like to read the stories in their English translation? Have you been involved in the translation process? Martin Aitken and I have worked on translating my stories one-by-one for the last five years. I never mess with the translation process itself, but when Aitken has finished a story we talk it over and I sometimes adjust things. Lucky for me, there's never much adjusting to be done. When I read the book in English for the first time it hit me that even though I wrote this book in Danish, it is still my stories, my language, my book. That goes to show what an amazing translator Martin Aitken is. How much of a role does Copenhagen play in the rest of the collection? Have you transformed any other beauty spots? I used to move around a lot, and I think back on the "Karate Chop" collection as kind of a logbook. There's a sense of a certain place in almost every story. There's a story about The Wadden Sea, about the Copenhagen suburbs; there's even a story or two set in the U.S. And there's a story where a Buddhist goes insane and flies his car across Denmark. I didn't mess with other beautiful Copenhagen sites, though. Not the Tivoli Gardens and not The Little Mermaid, either. Only Frederiksberg Gardens.