12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi

Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi is the author of DISINTEGRATION MADE PLAIN AND EASY (Piżama Press) and THE BOOK OF KANE AND MARGARET (FC2 / UAP). 

1 - How did your first book change your life? 
I was so sure my first book (THE BOOK OF KANE AND MARGARET) would never be published. I just thought, maybe these magical Japanese internment tales were too peculiar? Though, lots of the chapters had been published individually. But I wasn’t sure, maybe folks liked them as individual tiles? But maybe nobody wanted the whole tapestry? So I went through five years of doubt, feeling like I’d failed, let all of my writing teachers down. And then somehow, FC2 became such a loving home for it. It felt a little unreal, because for so long I thought, maybe I’m an awful writer??

In my memory, it was Aaron Fai, my wonderful beautiful friend, someone I went to graduate school with at UC Davis, who sent me the link for the FC2 contest and said, try. So it helped me to remember, it’s not a writer by themselves that makes it to the finish line. It usually takes a whole group of people working together to stay persistent and motivated. 

This collection of poems, DISINTEGRATION MADE PLAIN AND EASY, well, similar feelings were there. I’d been trying to get a version of the book published since 2014. At some point, I thought, maybe it’s not meant to be. Maybe not this strange, idiosyncratic collection of poems. But then Ben Niespodziany came into my life, and again, it felt unreal, magical. Somebody actually likes these poems enough to be their champion? The book is not just mine. It’s Ben’s. Piżama’s. It’s Gautam Rangan’s, who did thousands of profoundly beautiful illustrations for the book. I needed to remember, I don’t control any of this individually. I needed to find the right people to support it. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Very oddly. I met my partner when I was 21, and she went away, was sailing around the world. I missed her so much, one day, I kinda just sat down and started writing poems. So I wrote her like 150 love poems, really awful ones. I needed to have that overwhelming sense of dread and loneliness to push me into writing. But I think that was key, because it was just so many reps. I wrote those and then probably 150 more experiments before I started writing poems that don’t make me cringe. Maybe more? So many that needed to go into the trash. 

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
For a poem, I need a significant block of time. I used to love 4 hours, but I can’t get that anymore, because I have a couple of young kids. But if I get 90 minutes that’s usually what I need to start the poem. It’s sort of like improvising on a scene, a moment, a feeling, with myself. It’s just going down very far down the rabbit hole. I want to be as surprising as I can from one line to the next, but it’s weird, I’m both performer and audience. 

And then I just need to sit on that poem for a long time, over a year, and tinker with it. I think it’s a year of asking, what the hell is this thing? I’m trying to figure that out for a year, trying to make the poem, less self-conscious, more itself. 

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I’m usually working through iteration. Though, I often don’t know that until later. I’m making this bread, using the same sourdough, thinking ok, now I’m going to make a pie. Now I’m going to make a Black Forest cake. And then there’s just, all this sourdough on the counter. I usually think I’m doing something original, but my subconscious is usually leading me toward an iterative process. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I enjoy meeting new folks at readings. And I feel like doing readings keeps me excited and motivated. But also, I have an intense fear of public speaking. It’s a lucky and rewarding experience to get to read and share my work. But I’m usually also very terrified. 

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I love these questions. I think there are so many great questions, but I’m usually trying to remember 3 layers. First question / layer is how engaging is this work? Will it delight? Will it entertain? 

Second layer. Is this work relevant? Is it connected with something of concern in our culture, in our world right now? Does work attempt to transform attitudes and beliefs in a way that makes reader, world, more expansive, more generous, less judgmental, more open-minded? 

Third layer. Is the work innovative. Will work inspire someone who hasn’t written before? Will work inspire another practitioner, give them some tools to further their work? Add something to their lifelong practice? 

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Tough to answer these. I feel every writer will answer these questions uniquely. For me, they go back to those three layers that I think of for my writing practice: how entertaining, relevant and innovative can my work be to serve whatever readership I have the opportunity to serve. 

I also love that Chinua Achebe quote, that goes, “Clearly  there is no moral obligation to write in any particular way. But there is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless. An artist, in my definition of the word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects.” (From There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra)

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I feel like this process can be so lucky and rewarding and important for the work. Editor is helping to shape the work to become more itself. Editor is helping me to see all of the different strands in the work, how they are chiming, resonating off of each other. Editor is also helping to shape the work to be more interesting, exciting, memorable for the readers they serve. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I love what Jane Wong says about her poetic practice. The things you don’t use for one poem you put them on the “compost pile” because they may germinate something for another piece. Nothing goes to waste. You can always go back to your compost. And you don’t have to try to cram everything into one piece if it’s just not working right. 

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I have young kids now, so they dictate all the schedules and routines in my life. But some key commitment for me is a weekly writing meeting I have with the writers Aaron Fai and Megan Cummins. They are extraordinary writers and people, and we’ve been meeting on Friday mornings. Typically we talk shop and set goals and intentions then do some timed writing sprints, usually between 18-25 minutes. It’s a way to keep going to and stay serious about writing, even if the rest of the week is a whirlwind. 

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
If I’m stalled in poetry, I need to go watch or listen to some standup comedy. It’s an art form that seems so profoundly difficult and scary and complicated, and I find it to be intoxicating to watch. And I also find it has some overlap with poetics in a way that inspires me. These folks who are thinking about how all these different voices and scenes and moments will work moment to moment. Coming at an old topic from a new, sometimes strange angle. Being so careful and intentional about word choice. Those folks who do that really inspire me. 

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Lemons. And hominy. 

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Right now I’m sort of obsessed with films by Hong Sang-soo which have these fascinations with iteration, duplicity, doppelgängers. 

And I love Ruben Östlund’s films, in particular Force Majeure. Films about embarrassment and shame and the physical power and beauty of the human body. 

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
A huge percentage of what I read these days is literature for young readers, picture books, graphic novels. Really love books by Raina Telgemeier, Dan Santat, Kazu Kibuishi, Dav Pilkey, Scott McCloud, Lynda Barry. 

And there are so many craft books that have been key to my development, WONDERBOOK by Jeff VanderMeer, CRAFT IN THE REAL WORLD by Matthew Salesses, A SWIM IN A POND IN THE RAIN by George Saunders. 

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write a romance novel. Or write a screenplay for a romantic comedy. 

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
If I had the talent, and the bravery, and the right brain, I wish I could’ve done many other art practices. Music. Standup comedy. Visual arts. I’m not sure what I would’ve ended up doing if not for writing and teaching. Though my first job was washing dishes, and I was pretty good at it. 

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I wish I could’ve done something else. But then, I think reading and writing and seeing the world as a reader and writer has added so much to my life. Also, I think I write because it’s super cheap. Very little equipment to buy. 

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’m going to name two great books I read recently, both by comedians. The first is YOU’RE BETTER THAN ME by Bonnie McFarlane. And 488 RULES FOR LIFE: THE THANKLESS ART OF BEING CORRECT by Kitty Flanagan. 

The film that I thought should’ve been a huge runaway indie hit was I WILL MAKE YOU MINE by Lynn Chen. Sadly the film came out during the pandemic which likely complicated its release. But I loved that one and the other two films in that series.

19 - What are you currently working on?
I’m often working at some poems and fiction. Right now I have a folder on my desktop called NOVELS I WILL NEVER WRITE. It comes from an anxiety of having not enough years ahead of me to finish projects that I think would be fun or meaningful. And so the idea is to try and condense some novel ideas down into a summary, but summary kind of gets carried away and turns into a short story. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kirsten Allio

Kirstin Allio received the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize from FC2 for her 2024 story collection, Double-Check for Sleeping Children. Previous books are the novels Garner (Coffee House Press, LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction finalist), Buddhism for Western Children (University of Iowa Press), and the story collection Clothed, Female Figure (winner of the Dzanc Short Story Collection Competition). Recent stories, essays, and poems are out or forthcoming in AGNI, American Short Fiction, Annulet, Bennington Review, Black Sun Lit, Changes Review, Conjunctions, Fence, Guernica, Guesthouse, Harp & Altar, The Hopkins Review, Interim, New England Review, The Paris Review Daily, Plume, Poetry Northwest, The Southern Review, Subtropics and elsewhere. Her honors and awards include the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award, the PEN/O. Henry Prize, the American Short(er) Fiction Prize from American Short Fiction, chosen by Danielle Dutton, and fellowships from Brown University’s Howard Foundation and MacDowell. She holds an MFA from Brown, and lives in Providence, RI.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book, Garner, is a morality tale set in 1920s New Hampshire that chronicles an individuated, city sensibility encroaching on tradition and communal repression in a small rural town. A mystified layer or two deeper, it’s a rape novel. I learned, by writing, that I write in search of moral clarity. If there’s a moral formulation for being an artist it’s shaky, but the sense of calling is true. Becoming a writer with my first book stuck me in the moral crosshairs between service and self-fulfillment, where I remain.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?

That feeling of being both enchanted and overwhelmed by reality, and wanting to grasp it, understand, metabolize, reproduce it… An analogy for realist fiction for me is the still life. A vase. Just a vase—that leaps off the table, rolls, shatters, recombines—that’s a novel.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I am slow. Time itself is a key player, a creative agent. I mean that time actually does the work of composition and editing for me. I’ll typically take a flurry of fragmentary notes, impressionistic, outside the habitat of my office. Many stories start on trains, or sitting in somebody else’s park, somebody else’s city. Layer by layer, over years, I build up a story.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I usually know whether any given material—and it could be as small as a single image, or an exchange, or a glob of language—is a poem or short story or a novel. The seed material is sensitive to genre, as if it had a DNA. I have never turned a poem or a story into a novel. A novel has never turned out to be a story. I don’t know why this is so unerring for me.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love to read out loud, and every single time, I’m shocked by how effective an editing tool it is, a truth serum. When I read from published work, I always edit at the last minute, and then again in real time, and it kind of kills me, because of course it’s too late to change on the page, and then I vow to read out loud at all stages of writing…

So in that sense, public readings are essential to my writing process, and I’m grateful to friends and strangers who attend.

I shrink, however, from explaining my work, from claims of aboutness. Of course meaning isn’t finite, can’t be depleted, but I have a fear of foreclosing, cauterizing infinite meaning if I suggest one meaning or another. I’m also just not very fluent in summary. I could never write a book report in grade school. I feel there’s a risk of betraying the fiction if I talk about it in the language of nonfiction, or conversation, or explication—if I translate it into that unholy aboutness. Or maybe I’m the actor who has a really tinny, tiny voice, who’s just kind of a bimbo outside the film. I don’t want to disappointment readers.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Theories of the human condition! Theories of feminism—the koan-like question that opens The Second Sex, “Are there women, really?” Injustice, technology, nature, time.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

When a writer or a philosopher comes up with some gem of a justification, I’m the first to scribble it down on my napkin. Hannah Arendt, in Men in Dark Times: “The story reveals the meaning of what otherwise would remain an unbearable sequence of sheer happenings.” Art saves lives, and that kind of thing. I am always, always trying to justify my place on the planet. I can justify a calling—I feel I have one—but I cannot justify art-making as separate, isolated from, or even above service to humanity. So there I dwell, unjustified, called, uncomfortable, writing.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

It’s a rare pleasure. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Surely something that hit in the moment and then evaporated…

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to short stories to novels)? What do you see as the appeal?

It’s easy and necessary.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I write as much as I can, every day. I’m always fighting to write, and I’m endlessly greedy.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

In recent years I’ve been experimenting with collage. It’s an admission of defeat, and a real-time commitment, to kick writing out of my office and take over the floor, the desk, every surface cluttered with cuttings. Detritus. I keep all kinds of old pictures and papers. I have a 3-D collage on an old fencing mask I’ve been working on for 10 years with beads and feathers, odd jewelry and Lenin lapel pins from a summer in the USSR when I was 14. I’m awed by how much time it takes to make decisions in visual art. Part of the process is watching time dilate and get sucked into the void.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Gertrude Stein: “And then there is using everything.”

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

No fixed work—what’s important is the slowly, tectonically shifting stacks of books that fill my office.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

That’s a wolf of a question hiding in sheep’s clothing! I realize I’ve been fixated on returning to things I’ve let lapse, picking up threads and weaving old time into the present. I have never grown a garden. I would like to have the kind of time to try.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I was a great waitress. I wanted to be a dancer. I could have taught high school and grown that garden in the summers.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I had early, obsessional love affairs with first, the cello, and then modern dance. So I recognized the feeling when writing swept me off my feet. That was 30 years ago this fall—1994, I had transferred to NYU from dancing—the institution at the time took “life experience” credits, the jackpot of financial aid—and I walked in to a creative writing workshop, having never heard of creative writing. That first class was all it took, thanks to Professor Chris Spain. I wanted to get those feelings into words in my bare hands.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I have just seen the greatest film I’ve seen in years. It’s called Look Into My Eyes, and it’s a new documentary by the painterly, underworldly, hauntingly brilliant filmmaker Lana Wilson, about psychics in New York City.

I hated Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos until I loved it, at the very end. It is a novel built for its ending, when an anti-love love story gives way to grief for the lost communist dream, for an East Germany that might have veered away and solidified against capitalism to become what seems like an oxymoron, a humane nation. In Erpenbeck’s telling, the pull of plentiful, cheap goods and the similarly cheap frisson of competition were too strong, and here we are.

20 - What are you currently working on?

An experimental, hybrid story constellation of tautly coded iterations, inter-referential lyrics, frame-grabs from a contemporary collective subconscious—working title Matter and Pattern. Theme and variation are the dangers of emotional rationality, the violence of common sense, feminist philosophy and aphorism, female experience as negative space. Pattern acts on matter, matter provides content for pattern, language is both analysis and synthesis, thinking and knowing.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Vanessa Saunders

Vanessa Saunders is a professor of practice at Loyola University New Orleans. Her feminist, experimental novel, The Flat Woman, won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize with Fiction Collective 2 and is published by University of Alabama Press. Her hybrid work, fiction, and poetry has appeared in Seneca Review, Los Angeles Review, Sycamore Review, Passages North, and [PANK] among others. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, she received her MFA from Louisiana State University. 

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

When a publisher says yes to your project for the first time, it is an incredible feeling. Everything before that feels tentative and uncertain. I knew that I was a person who wrote, but I did not really feel like I could publicly call myself a writer until I had a book on contract. Being an artist during the pandemic was really agonizing and scary, especially since that was the period when I happened to finish my book. So I was getting all these rejections and honestly, questioning my choices to try to make this academic/ writer life work. Writers have to be emotionally strong and handle rejection well because it’s pretty constant. 

When I got the email, it was at the end of a very long day. But I can still remember jumping up and down in my living room and just feeling very happy. My husband was in the room with me and he did not understand what was happening at first. 

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?

So, actually, I would say I came to poetry first. I was originally planning to be a fiction writer when I was a young person. But when my first story was workshopped in my first creative writing class in San Francisco, it went really badly. It was a huge class, so we were split up into groups of five or four, with no professor present. I turned in a bad short story about a tragic romantic relationship I was in at the time. My small group absolutely obliterated my story. I can still remember a male student, wearing a waist coat and a fedora, telling me my story was “a loaf of bread that needed to become a casserole.” 

In short, they tore me apart. The guy in the waist-coat was pretty vicious. I came home and cried about it. From then on, I had this idea that I was a bad fiction writer.

But later, in poetry workshops, I got good feedback. People liked my poetry. So I listened to other people instead of myself, and I wrote poetry for years. My book, The Flat Woman, was actually initially conceived as a novel-in-verse and relied more on poetic conventions. It was only after that the poetry version of the project was rejected a number of times that I thought about turning back to fiction. My agent at the time suggested to me that writing my book as a novel would help it find a home. It ended up being a blend of fiction and poetry, though it has been officially marketed as fiction. 

Since then, I have been focused on writing fiction. Studying poetry for as long as I did has made me a better writer, but I had to go back to my roots and realize that I wanted to write about people. I like people and I think they are interesting. I knew what I wanted to write all along, but as a young person, it’s easy to ignore your own intuitions and feel focused on what other people’s opinions of you. Now that I’m older, I can see how important it is to trust your own judgment. And to realize people’s opinions of you often have nothing to do with you. You don’t need to worry about what everything else thinks. Although I do agree the short story I turned in for workshop back in 2009 was probably really, really bad. So the guy in the waistcoat was probably right. 

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

My projects take forever. In the case of The Flat Woman, I was trying to write about disengagement from the climate crisis. It took me at least two years to get the major bones of the story in place: women are being blamed for climate change. Our main character starts dating an environmental activist, which makes her question her own inaction.

It took me another three years to figure out what genre I was writing in (fiction, not poetry). And then another two years making it a novel instead of a book of poetry. This mostly meant developing interiority, narrative tension, and adding in elements of magical realism. 

I am hoping my second novel does not take as long as my first. 

4 - Where does a work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I am a book-length project person. I usually start with a question or a theme or a line of thought I want to interrogate, and then I spend years trying to make the characters, the conflict, voice, and the style speak to what I’m trying to write about. After the project coalesces, I then spend years trying to make sure the writing is nice and that every part of the story has heat. The Flat Woman is a story that relies a lot on strangeness as a narrative engine, and that took some time to perfect. 

But, usually, I’m thinking through an idea and using the space of the entire book to work it out. There is usually an element of the unexpected in my process, which is why I hate talking about projects before they’re complete.

For example: The Flat Woman was originally intended as a project about women’s issues and feminism. It was a total surprise to see all these environmental themes emerge. Of course, now those themes are a huge part of the book. But they were never part of my original plan. I think one of the things that makes me successful as a writer is allowing things to happen. Going with the flow. I am good at going with the flow in real life but I had to learn how to let things happen on the page and let the happy accidents materialize. In the past, I was too focused on narrative control, and that hampered my process. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

No, I don’t enjoy doing readings. But I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t hate them. I don’t enjoy listening to writing read aloud, I am not an audiobook person, so maybe I just don’t see the point. I think the point is to mingle with your community. But I’ve found personal happiness in separating my job from my personal life, which means maybe I’m not as connected with my writers community as I could be. That is something I’ve tried to work on during the last year. I will say, the writerly community in New Orleans is amazing and very welcoming. 

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I think each project has its own concerns. With The Flat Woman, I was thinking about personal responsibility in the context of mass disaster. 

As an artist, I like to create thought-driven conflicts that probe areas of moral ambiguity. All of my work is driven by my own strong sense of ethics as it contrasts with a world that puts me at odds with my values. Sometimes, life in America feels really complicated. There’s a lot of toxic harm all around us. I like to write about ordinary people who have complex relationships to good and evil.

Lately I’ve wondered if this point of view had anything to do with growing up in the Bay Area. There is a really high homeless population living next to communities of extreme wealth and privilege. Living in San Francisco and Oakland, I would be confronted with people begging for money all the time. It happened multiple times a day. The people who ask you for money are really struggling, have visible signs of their struggle in their body and demeanor. So, what do you do? A good person would give up some of their money, but what if you can’t afford to do this again and again? What if the money you give them is used to feed their addiction and so just makes things worse? The super uncomfortable ethical questions of how to behave in this type of situation is at the center of my work. That kind of confrontation with one’s own privilege and one’s apathy towards suffering is incredibly uncomfortable.  I think a lot of people in the bay just learn to just ignore the people begging and not even say anything. I do think in America, we’ve become really numb to one another. 

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I don’t believe in art as an object of emotional catharsis. For that reason, I don’t write about my personal life in my work, and I have not for a long time. I’m unable to write about personal things well because I lack emotional distance from the subject, so I don’t do it very well in my opinion. 

I don’t believe in one single interpretation to this question of the role of art or the writer’s role in the world. But I do have an individual philosophy that dictates how I write. And let me be clear here that I write literary fiction. I like to incorporate genre elements into my work, but I write for a literary audience.

I believe that art should help the reader view the world differently. I was very influenced by an interview with Ben Lerner and the Believer where he said, “The libindal should be harnessed by the political.” Specifically he says, “I think that sexual pleasure and the weird color of the sky after a storm or the stream of tail lights across the bridge or the way silence can thin or thicken before music starts—all these things have to be harnessed by the political.”

That is to say, writing should interrogate the relationship between individuals and the wider systems that affect their experience of the world. These can be literal systems– such as the health care system– or abstract systems– such as the wider question of human goodness. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

No, I love feedback. I’ve been doing this long enough that I’m not super precious about my work. Anyone who is investing their time into helping you improve should be cherished. 

Writing is an interesting balance of ignoring other people’s opinions and using people’s opinions to help you elevate your shit. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Success as a writer is not about talent. It is a question of persistence. 

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to hybrid work)? What do you see as the appeal?

Studying poetry made me a better writer of prose. It helped me understand that each novel has its own style, and the voice of the piece should be carefully curated according to the theme and topic. Of course, my decisions on this front are often more intuitive. 

But I think the whole point of poetry is to find the perfect form for the topic you’re writing about. And so I apply that to fiction. This means I don’t have one static style, but I do have a style for each of my specific projects. People have said that I have a lot of range for that reason. I’ve also read a lot, which helps me have a flexible approach to writing. 

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

During the academic semester, I usually spend about two hours writing every day, and then an hour reading. Then I spend the rest of the day on my teaching duties, which often involves more reading. 

This changes in the summer when I have more time to write. As you can see, I spend a lot of time writing. But reading is just as important as writing. It helps me have more insight into my own form. 
For example, reading Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson inspired me to write The Flat Woman.

Reading Get In Trouble by Kelly Link helped me figure out how to finish it. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I don’t get stalled very often. I’ve had some personal things happen in life that sometimes impact my relationship to what I’m working on. If something is uncomfortable, I try to write into the space of the discomfort. Or incorporate that discomfort into the plot. 

If I have questions about what I’m working on, I try to read people who I think will help me figure it out. My current project is steeped in historical research, so sometimes I’ll have questions about practical historical things that trip me up. Researching helps me answer those questions and allows me to better imagine the world of my book.

Sometimes, you just need some space away from the project. Distance is everything. It can be hard to let yourself have a break if you’re focused on a deadline. But what my first book did is teach me how to have patience. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Probably the smell of dry dirt or the smell of the ocean. I’m from northern California and I grew up about forty-five minutes from the beach. I come from a very ecologically conscious place in the world, and growing up, I spent a lot of time outdoors in nature. Its not a surprise that the environment is such a huge presence in The Flat Woman. But The Flat Woman is an expression of my anxiety about the condition of the planet. In this book, the environment is decaying, rotting, and is quite disgusting. In the second half of the book, The Flat Woman leans into a more ecological horror element, which is a reflection of own climate anxiety. 

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I definitely am a television and movie person. My work uses a lot of visual inspiration from the stories I watch on the screen. The Flat Woman is a story that relies on imagery heavily to make meaning. Right now, I am actually working on a television pilot of The Flat Woman, and it’s been interesting to me how easily the story can be adapted to a different mode. Maybe that novel was always meant to be written as a television show. But I suppose speculative fiction relies on memorable visuals to build the world– just like the red cloaks in Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. So maybe speculative stories generally convert well to film. 

Back when I was writing more poetry than I am now, I used to find inspiration in all types of texts: questionnaires, brochures, diary entries, emails, etc. I used to be pretty obsessed with form and using friction between different forms as an engine. But now I think more about stories: conflict, scenes, and rising tension. I never thought I would be a person who works on traditional stories. But the novel I’m working on is structurally a pumpkin spice latte, which is to say it’s pretty basic. The book of poetry I’m working on is very experimental, but that project is hard to talk about.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I would say the writers who I think about the most are: Anne Carson, Kelly Link, and Toni Morrison. Kelly Link combines genres and tropes from high and low culture in a way that fascinates me. Anne Carson uses hybridity and poetic forms to tell stories in a way that fascinates me. And Toni Morrison helped me understand that novels can have all the beauty and precision of language as poetry. She also wrote novels that were incredibly important and filled an important niche in American literature. 

There is a story about Toni Morrison’s life I often think about. Her landlord set fire to her family home, while her family was at home, because her parents could not afford to pay rent. Instead of becoming angry, they just laughed in his face. For me, she represents elegance and integrity in a world that tries to strip a person of those virtues. She is a model of feminine strength, wisdom, and holding onto your own self worth. 

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Visit South Africa. Visit Asia. Visit Argentina. 

As a writer, I’m pretty nomadic in the sense that I flit between genres. But I’m also a nomadic person in general. I love to see new places and experience different parts of the world. In my twenties, I spent a few months living in the Dominican Republic, and about three years living in the United Kingdom, so for a while, people would look at my resume and have no idea where I was actually from. I have been living in south Louisiana for ten years, which is the longest place I’ve lived anywhere besides California. Anyway, I’ve invested a lot of my time and money into traveling. It’s probably my favorite thing to do besides write and spend time with loved ones. 

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I am ultimately good with language and for that reason, I find language interesting. So I would probably be someone who writes speeches or public policy. At the end of the day, I want my jobs to be meaningful and give me purpose along with money. So I suppose I would’ve tried to use my skills to help other people. If not in writing then in some type of humanitarian role. All that being, being a writer and a professor is a perfect job for me. I know these types of positions are shrinking every year, and I’m very grateful to do the work that I do. I try to be very intentional with how I use the classroom space, and so I try to model ethical behavior and not waste anyone’s time. 

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I always wanted to be a writer. Ever since I was a kid. But I got really serious when I was twenty. That was when I started to have a serious writing practice. That was also the time I started studying creative writing at San Francisco State University. I focus well if it’s a subject I’m interested in, and I think my discipline is why I’ve been successful. As James Baldwin said, “Talent is insignificant.”

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I recently read Tar Baby by Toni Morrison. I am convinced she is the best prose writer of her time. Reading her always makes me want to push myself. 

Not a film exactly, but I find myself thinking back to Station Eleven a lot. It’s the same writer and showrunner as The Leftovers. I love the way that writer uses metaphysical themes in his work. I always think about the scenes in Station Eleven where the characters in the film are performing scenes from plays like Shakespeare. But the scenes they are performing have an interesting overlap to the conflict in real life. I felt that juxtaposition was really clever. 

20 - What are you currently working on?

I am working on a novel of Weird fiction, a book-length prose poem, and a television adaptation of The Flat Woman. But, mostly, at the moment, I’m mostly doing interviews and other marketing stuff to prepare for my book launch in two months.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Sophie Klahr and Corey Zeller, There Is Only One Ghost in the World

 

My mother was reading a book to me in bed when we saw the reflection of flames on my bedroom wall. Across the street, the neighbor’s house was burning. I remember being outside in my nightgown, barefoot, my feet in the runoff the firetruck bled, ambulance-men rustling onto the stretcher something dark. My parents told me later that our neighbor, the old woman I called Aunt Heppy, had died, and that her old white dog had died too, but that her German shepherd puppy had survived. It jumped through the big glass window of the living room, breaking the broad pane. At school, everything was uniform. The kids all wore the same outfits and their parents all had the same medications. You looked out the window most of the time. You learned more than anyone should ever know about the sky. You drew a line with a stick in the new snow and dared a friend on the other side to cross it. Once you cross it, you can never come back, you told him. He was reduced to tears, and you got in trouble, even though his explanation made no sense to anyone. They told me I could never come back, he wailed. Only when I was grown-up did I realize that it couldn’t be true, that the puppy could not have broken the glass. I asked my mother, and she admitted it wasn’t true.

Selected as the winner of the 2022 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest is Sophie Klahr and Corey Zeller’s collaborative There Is Only One Ghost in the World (Tuscaloosa AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2023), an accumulation of untitled self-contained first-person stories, none of which are each longer than a single page, that appear to connect or thread only loosely through structure and tone. I’m startled by how each narrative of seemingly random turns allows for a different kind of structure, one that composes fiction almost akin to the arc of a poem, moving from moment to moment, and allowing the collision and accumulation of these varying threads to provide connection only through the act of reading, and the reader themselves. There is nothing straightforward here, and there are some stunning and powerful moments throughout these pieces, woven into the larger fabric of this incredibly interconnected book-length quilt, offering wisdoms, comforts and important truths. “A girl you loved once loved you more and got angry when you didn’t love her like that,” the two of them write, “like, back enough. She is angry enough to say that you aren’t queer enough. This is always the problem—others drawing little boxes around your desire, waiting at a long panel like a spelling bee competition, waiting for you to fumble.” Another piece offers: “Optimism is a chandelier. It swings to one side catching some light. It swings back and catches the dark. Pessimism, on the other hand, is nothing but a weathervane, a lightning rod.” Or elsewhere: “A piece of what elegy can do is hold an absence by naming it, as if, by saying its endlessness, it is, for a moment fixed in time, when so often there seems no end to grief, only its opening. Even a poem on endlessness has an ending, a hand, for a moment, resting on one’s shoulder.”

The stories touch on, and even return, like a skipping stone bouncing across water, to subjects including queer desire, loneliness, trauma, politics and culture wars, hope and memory, one thought immediately following another, moving through moments and references that fade in and out of view with remarkable clarity. As one piece offers: “Being pansexual doesn’t mean that you are attracted to more people than anyone straight or gay might be. It just means that desire is a kaleidoscope, and you are all of the pieces inside.” I’m curious at how the back-and-forth between these two authors worked, exactly, if each composed individual pieces that bled together, or if each piece itself has the hands of both authors within; in a certain way, none of it matters. There are certain directions that make me wonder if a handful of pieces were written by one author over the other, but on the whole, the tone is incredibly consistent, providing a wonderfully coherent whole between these two writers, during the pandemic era. As they write as their “Note on Creation” at the end of the collection: “This book was written collaboratively over the course of eight months during the Coronavirus pandemic (November 2020-August 2021), in a single shared Word document, from six states away.” I’m now curious to see further of their individual works: on her part, Los Angeles poet and editor Sophie Klahr is the author of the poetry collections Meet Me Here at Dawn (YesYes Books, 2016) and Two Open Doors in a Field (Backwaters press, 2023), and Corey Zeller is the author of MAN VS. SKY (YesYes Books, 2013) and YOU AND OTHER PIECES (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2015), none of which I’ve seen (I’m clearly behind on my reading). Oh, this is a book I wished I’d written; and I am terribly jealous.

Fish have something in them called a lateral line—this is what helps their schools stay together. When they want to stay still, they face upward. Into the current. The day closes itself like an orphan’s locket, the lip of a candle resembling lace almost touching the inside of a thigh. Now, and only now, you fail to find a difference. Some handless beauty. Blinking and squinting at the clearest possible scene. Truth reversed does not make a lie. A lie reversed does not make truth. The truth of a person is different than the truth of the poem. You try to make a Venn diagram of this, but can’t figure out what to put in the third circle or in the pill shape of the intersection. A certain type of ants collect the skulls of other ants to decorate its nest. There is a type of shark that new theories say may have a lifespan of up to six hundred years. In Greenland, one is caught that scientists estimate as being between two hundred and seventy-two years old and five hundred and twelve years old. There are certain types of crystals in the eyes of this shark. The oldest type of poetry is poetry with a riddle inside.