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.
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