inviting a haunting: A Conversation with Karen Russell on Amphibious Child Narrators, the Collision of Myths, and Omnivorous Readers
Karen Russell is an American novelist and short story writer. Her debut novel, Swamplandia!, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 2009 the National Book Foundation named Russell a 5 under 35 honoree. She was also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" in 2013.
On April 10, 2024, Karen Russell joined The Interlochen Review editors Rowen Erickson, Charlotte Lucas, Noah Ma, and Emily Pickering for a conversation about her short story collections Vampires In The Lemon Grove, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, and Orange World and Other Stories, her novella Sleep Donation, and her novel Swamplandia!.
Rowen Erickson: I noticed that a lot of your fiction tends to play with social conventions and social horror, and the way that they shape the relationships that exist within them. For instance, your short story “Reeling for the Empire” in Vampires in the Lemon Grove takes the dynamic of unpaid labor to the extreme. How do you approach the use of fantasy elements to stress the different aspects of these social conventions?
Karen Russell: I love fantasy for its potential to show us things that we have a hard time seeing in everyday lighting. It's very fun to make a world up on paper. I have two little kids now, and I think that joy is part of it, just seeing what you can make live on paper. With “Reeling for the Empire,” I had been reading a lot about these feminist uprisings in Japanese textile mills, and there was no way for me to write about that as straight history. Part of that is just the kind of writer I am. To feel like I have the authority to imagine anything at all, I have to do a lot of research, but then I need to rearrange nature or make some alteration. There's a great Flannery O'Connor quote I love, “The truth is not distorted here, but rather, a distortion is used to reveal truth.” In this story where these young women are tricked into becoming workers at this mill, they go from working in this cottage industry of silk reeling to becoming literally part of a machine.
I love the Eastern European fabulists, I love Kafka, I love Octavia Butler and Angela Carter, I love magical realists like Gabriel Garcia Marquez. That is a sampling of my reading DNA. I often find myself beginning with a bedrock of real history and then bending reality in some way, searching for a bridge between my life and a character in a very different context. In the case of “Reeling for the Empire,” I was haunted by a vision of the women working at these mills, the violent metamorphoses inside of individual human bodies provoked by the Industrial Revolution. The monstrosity of this metamorphosis where you go from being in your home, embedded in a different kind of circulatory system, and now suddenly the black ships come, Japan has been yoked into trade with the West, it's the industrial revolution. Time is on a factory clock, and what that does to people's interiority. In the case of these women who become literal silkworm monsters, they're stuck in some limbo, they can't get to the final stage of their metamorphosis. All of their energy, all of their dreaming, all of their thread is given to this machine, taken from them. If you read about people leaving their villages and going to work for a factory, you don't get that bodily sense of what has happened to you, what has been taken from you in that environment and in our economy. It's still our economy.
Noah Ma: My question is more on genre. Where do you think fiction with fantastical elements fits in contemporary literature?
KR: There are so many writers today who are straddling genres. I was coming up at a time when things felt a little more siloed, where perhaps the boundary betwen “literary” fiction and “genre” fiction felt less permeable. When I was a kid, I remember feeling bewildered by the library taxonomies. As an adult, I continue to be mystified at time as to why certain novels are marketed as fantasy while others are presented as literary fiction. Jane Eyre definitely has ghosts, right? But it's shelved under classics. And then you have somebody like Stephen King, who I think is a really beautiful storyteller, and who writes mysteries, memoirs, bone-chilling horror that is also complex portraiture of the best and worst of human nature. He has incredible sentences, he's an amazing prose stylist. People have always loved Ursula K. Le Guin and Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler, and today we've got Colson Whitehead writing about zombies, and Mariana Enriquez, who writes these incredible ghost stories.There are speculative elements in a lot of what might be called literary fiction, largely by marketers. It’s a category that is bewildering to me; it doesn't always feel like a taxonomy. There are some very fine writers who are interested in demolishing this distinction between literary and genre fiction.
Charlotte Lucas: Going off of that, “Children's Reminiscence of the Western Migration” coalesces Greek mythology and American lore. How do the divergence between these two worldviews of the mythos and American history influence the topics that you write about?
KR: Thank you for reading that Minotaur story that way. It's about this obdurate dad who demands that his family accompany him to the American West. Initially, to be very honest, it was just funny to me to picture a super stubborn dad as a Minotaur, pulling everyone out there. I had been reading Women's Diaries of the Westward Migration. Many women were saying, “Oh, please let us not go.” They were not thrilled about leaving their families in the East. They knew that the so-called “Free Indian Lands” promised to them by the Homestead Act belonged to Native nations—these settlers were weaponized by the U.S. government in a centuries-long war against Native peoples. What a trap, what a terrible contract to enter. Many immigrants seeking a sanctuary from imperial wars and persecution became colonizers in America. In the Greek myth, a minotaur is trapped in an elaborate, bewildering structure, a labyrinth that feels inescapable. The Greek myth of the minotaur trapped in a maze felt appropriate for a story like this one, where a father pulls his family into the West, and feels hauled along himself by the so-called American dream. This Minotaur-father is lost in a maze of desire and denial, in addition to the labyrinthine social and economic structures that shape our choices and our lives, “the pain of being born into a contest that you did not design.” He is driven by a very primal wish to give his children a home, and horizon-light; as he sets his sights on the dream of the frontier, he ignores both the risk to his own family and the horrific costs of Manifest Destiny to Indigenous people. As the story progresses, optimism tips into denial and delusion; the dream becomes a nightmare. I think many people alive today feel caught in a labyrinth, trapped by our winner-takes-all economy and by the systems of domination in which we all participate, however unhappily. I found the Minotaur father to be a tragic figure, despite the goofiness of the premise. He can’t or won’t see the monstrosity of the quest to which he’s committed his children, his wife.
We have these myths about the American West that persist to this day. I just went to Frontierland with my children, and I was curious, have there been any edits to Frontierland since I was a kid? None that I could see. To this day, mainstream culture romanticizes the U. S. war against Native Peoples—and inverts U.S. aggression against Native nations into a kind of fantasy of cowboys and Indians. That was definitely something that I was interested in, exploring what that looks like through a child's eye. Child narrators, especially when I was younger myself, I was always drawn to, because they have permission to talk about what's absurd, what's horrible, what they really see before it gets covered over by the fantasy that we sell as history. Part of what was nice about having a Minotaur dad was the way children can see their parents as legends, these figures of myth, and that part of growing up, you realize you're just an animal. You're mortal. This infinite love you feel happens to be packaged in a very vulnerable, mortal container.
CL: You touched on this, but what other elements of writing about children and from their perspective attract you to writing those kinds of stories?
KR: A lot of it is that kids can see something. They're still wide awake. What's nice about children, too, is they're so funny. They also live in this liminal zone where they are fed by many streams. Kids can kind of shift amphibiously between a more adult apprehension of things and then drift back into fantasy.
I also love reading books by child narrators. I love The Heart is a Lonely Hunter where Carson McCullers, who was so young herself, writes this character who's thirteen with as much nuance and complexity as the other adult characters in that book. Russell Banks has a book called Rule of the Bone that I read when I was probably your age. I fell in love with this narrator, this scabby, angry child. You have a little bit of estrangement too. It's not quite the same as writing a story from the point of view of an animal or an extraterrestrial, but you do have a different kind of telemetry. You're getting this world that we think we know through a fresh perspective, and it always wakes me up to what is monstrous and sublime, both the horror and the wonder of everyday life.
Emily Pickering: Your novel Swamplandia!, which was amazing, originated as a short story. When you begin writing, do you typically have a form in mind, like your novella, Sleep Donation, or do you find the process to be more fluid as you develop the story?
KR: As a young person I think everything I wrote was like a shapeless mist of emotion. I don't remember having any corset of narrative of any kind, any kind of understanding of plot. It was just sort of a kudzu sprawl of feeling. Unfortunately my process still tends to be a kudzu sprawl. It just takes me a while to know what I'm up to in any form. I sometimes feel like I write the way that my children make stuff up. So, Sleep Donation was meant to be just like a three page riff. The New Yorker had asked for people to come up with an imaginary technology that you wished existed. I was like, I wish somebody could transfuse sleep and dreams into me, like the Red Cross blood van. I want to be able to donate it and receive it. It could have ended there as a really goofy riff, but then it haunted me. I kept thinking about that twilight space and the dream circulatory system, which feels so close to what books are. Usually that's what happens. There'll be some image or some goofy conceit, like what if a Minotaur pulled their family to the West? If it works at all, it becomes hitched to some genuine question that feels urgent.
CL: The main events of “Haunting Olivia” occur after Olivia has died. How do you decide when in time to place a narrative in regards to the protagonist's life? And how did you decide the control of information regarding the significant events surrounding Olivia's death?
KR: I have to confess, I wrote some of these a while ago, when I was not so much older than you. Sometimes artists talk about making something, and it's all this beautiful post hoc confabulation, and it feels so orderly that you can forget that it was a mess for a long time. That story started off in the dumbest way, which was that I was leading high school kids on this trip. It was a cultural exploration trip to Cuba, and we went snorkeling in a boat graveyard. I thought, wouldn't it be great if we could also see underwater ghosts, because obviously the ocean must be entirely haunted? Things have been living and dying in the ocean for a really long time. We were by this ghost ship and I said that, and all the students were like, “Yeah okay, let's have lunch.”
It was really kind of a surprise to me. I was like, I'll have these two brothers who have found these enchanted goggles. I didn't know that they were looking for their sister. That was just clause to clause when that showed up. I think stories are haunted that way too—you're just opening yourself up. That blinking cursor in the white space feels always like inviting a haunting. When things are working well, I always feel like I'm being surprised. When things are not working, it's just paint by number.
RE: What is your process for refining selections within a collection of short stories and the overall atmosphere they provide? How do you order the stories once you’ve narrowed them down, and what went into the decision to have Vampires in the Lemon Grove at the front of its namesake, and make it the namesake?
KR: I remember at that time, Twilight was really big, and a lot of people were concerned about that—like, this is not a sexy vampire. This is a decrepit, monogamous, sober vampire. I really do think of it as a little bit of a mixtape, and I think it’s intuitive, in that way. That story I liked as that opening, because a lot of stories in that particular collection look at human monstrosity. There are some real horror stories in that collection, and there are some gentler horror stories, some melancholy stories, and I think “Reeling” is that for me. The women who become these silkworm monsters are not the monsters, right, but there is a bloodthirsty economy that has completely warped their unique consciousnesses, they are now a part of the factory machine, their very bodies have been remade into factories, there is an imperative to transform time and labor into profit, and they have gotten spun around it and spooled around it and trapped inside it.
“Vampires,” I thought, that’s sort of a funnier story, so I liked that—to start with “Reeling” would have been so intense. This seemed like a nice door to open tonally to where there’s humor and horror. I really wanted to write a comic and consequential story. I had written all of these child narrators, and then I had written one old man, and I thought “yeah, I can write adults!” And then this guy’s eight hundred, so I feel like it was an overcorrection, slightly, to go from a twelve-year-old to an eight-hundred-year-old. The first story you do, I think you’re like, “Here’s the tone, guys!” Here’s the “Dorothy, we’re not in Kansas anymore” ante, and if people are into that, then you hope they’ll come through the door to some of the other stories. The last story I always think of as, what’s the last chord you want to hold? I really think of it musically—what is going to group and gather some of the preoccupations, some of the questions? How do you articulate that question one final time? What do you want to leave people with? What note do you want to gong in them? It feels like that, wanting a resonance to travel from the book to the reader.
EP: I personally have read St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves in multiple English classes. How do you see your work being taught in schools? In addition, your books aren’t marketed exclusively for young adults but are really popular with teenagers—why do you think your work resonates with that audience?
KR: I’m so happy that it resonates with young people. I feel like all my most profound reading experiences happened when I was young. I love reading now, but part of it is that you are just spinning yourself into yourself at that time, so it’s beautiful to meet a reader at that threshold. It’s funny now that I feel like my reflexive sympathies have shifted to the adults, and I’m like, “The adults tried really hard!” I feel like they don’t really come off so well in a lot of the earlier work, and interestingly in these new stories, I have a lot of very flawed parents, like nobody’s winning Father of the Year, but I’m like “well, but they love the kids!” Now that I have children of my own, I find that I feel a lot of compassion and admiration for parents. It’s an audacious thing, sponsoring a new being on this planet.
People my age have a lot of incentives to tune out what they deeply know and feel because you have a mortgage, you have a bill to pay, you’re like that French executioner, “well, it’s not great what I’m doing, but I am financially welded to this system that turns people into parts and labor, right, that alchemizes time into money.” You don’t really have permission to feel out and flower into what is both wondrous and horrible about being alive. One thing that I love about coming to a place like Interlochen and meeting younger writers is that people your age get to live to the top of their intelligence and sensitivity. Whenever I read There’s an epidemic of depression and anxiety around young people, I’m like, duh! You would have to be a sociopath to be young and not be concerned right now. You’ve grown up with this awareness that we’re in ecological crisis your whole lives.
I am always complimented when younger people find something in my work, because I think it’s the crest of the wave. These are people who are fully awake to all of it still, they can really see. And you become a little more myopic in midlife. Part of it is that people feel like they’re in a tunnel of economic precarity, and don’t really have that ability, from the top of the wave, to see what this life is, to feel into possibility. I also feel like young people people can be some of our sharpest readers of both literature and reality. Wide-awake to the truths that older adults often defend themselves against knowing and feeling.
RE: How do you see cross-genre short stories and longer works of fiction becoming more and more popularized, both in literature and as film, since you’ve been previously optioned by HBO? What does that process look like for a critically acclaimed author who straddles subgenres of fiction? What excites you about the possibility of opening other subgenres to film?
KR: I think it’s really exciting. I’ve had a lot of stuff optioned, and nothing has been made, so I always try to hold it lightly. My husband and I are adapting the story “The Prospectors,” this Oregonian ghost story in a Timberline lodge, which was the inspiration for The Shining, so that’s been really fun. I really hope that it gets made, but we’ll just have to see. Patrick Somerville, who did Station Eleven—I love that show—is working on an adaptation of Sleep Donation with me. So that’s been fun, and what’s interesting is discovering what you can make live in film. For example, so much of my pleasure as a writer comes from extending metaphors to the point of near-collapse, cultivating these totally foliated metaphors, and it’s interesting, no one involved in TV/film seems to think they want a voiceover of someone reading off a metaphor. That doesn’t seem to be what the people want in this medium, so I’m learning a lot too, about what you can do with visual juxtapositions.
One thing that’s weird about films is their budgets––that’s something I hadn’t really thought about. Location changes cost a lot, it’s just a different set of considerations. And people don’t love to work with child actors. Somebody approached me about optioning Swamplandia! and they were like “well, the child actors are going to be a problem, so maybe you could reconfigure the story,” and I was like, “do you just want to option the Everglades? I don’t really know what’s left.”
I’m learning a lot, but so much of the pleasure of fiction for me is having access to these interior worlds. Getting to that place where external and internal forces merge, you can show some of that on film. Josephine Decker right now is working on an adaptation of Swamplandia! that I’m excited about because she’s so good at these tonal slides between something more like consensus reality and something that feels like the turbulence of an interior world that’s invisible to others. It’s all visual, it’s just such a different way to work. Every metaphor is visual.
RE: You’ve worked with dancers on creating other pieces of art, so how do you work with that process, of working with other artists and transforming your vision into their vision?
KR: That’s been so fun. These interdisciplinary collaborations are great. Writing is such a lonely, solitary deal, so this is what I imagine it feels like to play on a team, or to play with a band. What it taught me was how much better things can become when you’re open to different inputs. I love being edited, which feels similar, getting inputs from other imaginations and consciousnesses. I’d never really tried to build a world from the ground up, and what was really moving to me about the process was how everyone had to be such a freak about their own thing. Everyone had to be hyper-attuned to the thing that was theirs in the world-building process. The lighting guy had to be a true freak about the lighting. The dancers, were they in sync, where were their bodies in space? The conductor was rowing us all through time. To cast and hold that spell required sixty people working at the height of their powers. It felt like being part of a Marvel movie, part of a collective of people with unique superpowers all working together for the same goal, it was such a pleasure to hold that spell with New York City soloists and this gorgeous pit orchestra, and that was instructive to me, to see how much it actually mattered. For it to really function, nobody could slack.
It made me think about how much has to go correctly in writing for a story to work, because in a funny way, on paper, you’re introducing people to a world, you’re alerting them to the tone, but much like how I was saying about the metaphors being visual, it’s interesting to see and feel into how a song was instructing you in what to feel and giving you silence as a space—everybody arrowing in the same direction was a beautiful feeling.
EP: What can you tell us about your upcoming novel, The Antidote?
KR: It’s set in an imaginary Nebraskan town during the Dust Bowl drought, and it’s about collapse—and recovery. I haven’t quite figured out how to describe it succinctly yet. Women who call themselves “prairie witches” take deposits of memories from settlers, and store their secrets in their bodies. Memories that people can’t stand to remember, or bear to forget. The prairie witches receive these deposits through ear horns—antique hearing aids, with gramophone-like funnels. On Black Sunday, the protagonist, a witch who calls herself “The Antidote,” wakes to discover that she has gone bankrupt overnight. All of the memories she held in the vault of her body for her customers have vanished. She and a scabby young orphan start counterfeiting memories for people who return to withdraw their deposits. It doesn’t go well. It’s a multi-perspectival novel, and one of my favorite point of view characters is a New Deal photographer who begins making uncanny photographs, exposing the town’s true origins and many possible futures.
As in earlier work, I continued to be interested in the fantasies that cover over real histories, and the crimes of memory that enable future violence. “The Antidote” takes this conceit of a regional collapse of memory and dramatizes all the terrible destruction that flows from people’s private refusal or inability to reckon with the past. But I hope the book also conjures beautiful possibilities, latent in the past, and living alongside us.
This all makes the novel sound quite dire, and I hope there’s also some dark humor in addition to all the blowing dust, some playfulness in the sentences and the structure. There’s a cat narrator, there’s a scarecrow who’s supposed to be the comic relief, and he’s really not funny at all. I told my best friend “He’s really just not pulling his narrative weight,” and then she asked me, “Was that a realistic expectation for a man made of straw?” I thought that was a good point.
NM: On your writing process, do you finish a full draft of a story before starting another one or do you work on multiple projects simultaneously?
KR: I think this has changed. There’s a real line that I would call the pre- and postpartum dividing line because now I feel like a lot of my life I’m making sandwiches. When I was a younger writer I knew that something was failing in a novel, like Swamplandia! because I kept on writing these stories. A lot of the stories in A Vampire in the Lemon Grove were written as an escape from my swampy novel that I was lost in. I usually have multiple work sites open unless something is going great, and then I just want to live in that world, then I’m ignoring calls from my real friends to be with these imaginary weirdos. It’s a little harder with kids because it turns out I prefer to be with my real kids than ghosts. I just finished this novel that was incredibly challenging, and I’ve written no stories since 2022.
NM: How do you find yourself shifting gears from one story to another and how do you keep magical elements from one project from leaking into another world?
KR: I think you can’t, but if you’re working on two things that start to very closely resemble each other, in my experience, one is siphoning the energy away from another. You go to where the heat is on the page for you, so I have definitely had that happen where I’ll end up with two weird Lynchian twin stories, but usually one is a little stronger. I just went through this period where I was only writing about kids, so I was like, here comes a pregnant unicorn, here comes a devil who wants to breastfeed. Sometimes if you’re writing a suite around a certain set of questions or preoccupation, each writer has to decide, am I doing something sufficiently new with this story? When I’m turning the Rubik’s Cube of whatever is haunting me at this time in my writing life, does this justify a story of exploration, or is this other adjacent idea or conceit a little stronger, is this where I can live and help a reader to live? It’s very porous.
CL: I’ve noticed between stories throughout your short story collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, for example, “Haunting Olivia” and “Children’s Reminiscences on the Western Migration,” that there’s similar use of syntax, and differing line length. How do you utilize these tools and other elements of craft to create a voice? In other words, what makes a Karen Russell story a Karen Russell story?
KR: I feel like an unreliable narrator with that a little bit myself. A friend of mine, Jim Shepard, who’s an amazing story writer, he writes all over the place, he’ll write about Yeti hunters and French executioners, and I asked him, how do you make these characters who are so unlike you live? How do you make them credible? He drew a Venn diagram for me and he put, in one circle, Jim Shepard, literature professor, father of three, responsible for providing for his family. And he put executioner in the other circle. And he looked for overlapping concerns, the shaded part of the Venn. The story is called “Sans Farine,” and it’s a brilliant exploration of how a man convinces himself that he has no choice, that he has no real agency, that in dropping the guillotine he is only following orders, something he must do to feed his family. No matter what you do to make a living, when you read this story you will recognize what it is to feel compromised in such a profound way, to feel like you are never living out your values, to justify that to yourself because you say, it’s my job. I’m embedded in this system, I’m not the agent of violence, I’m just dropping the lever. I’m not the author of this tragedy, I’m just peripheral to it. That was Jim Shepard’s his way in, the bridge he built between himself and a character from another culture and century who seems in many ways quite distant from the author. Shepard explores the horror that can flood into the world when people override their conscience and justify it by invoking their childrens’ needs, by telling themselves that they have no part in the suffering that feeds them, that they are simply doing their job.
I don’t always draw a Venn diagram, but I would say that without being one to one autobiography ever, Swamplandia! is an incredibly personal story that has its roots sunk in the bedrock of some real family history, painful history. But I would never have been able to write about it under the spell of my own name, in this kind of lighting. I wouldn’t be able to be honest. Sometimes it’s finding a way into a character very unlike me.
The story I’ve written that’s closest to home was “Orange World” and it was about a mother of a newborn, it’s that breastfeeding devil that I mentioned. That’s as close to autobiography as I’ve ever written. But I really needed that fairytale element, I needed that devil to come in, because it shifted it far enough out of my lived experience and into this realm of imagination that I could be honest about things that would’ve been impossible for me to feel into and write about.
I’m still not really sure what makes a Karen Russell story a Karen Russell story. I know that I’ve failed every time I’ve tried to write straight realism. Like if I was to do Swamplandia! as “this is a family in Jersey, one sister has suicidal ideation,” it would never have worked. It would’ve been a really flat and false story, so I know I need to find a way for my imagination to play before I can make anything happen.
NM: In your craft essay, “Engineering Impossible Architectures,” you talk about how characters’ convincing human reactions convince the reader’s suspension of disbelief. How do you approach giving characters convincing reactions in stories like “The Bad Graft” when characters are a degree away from human?
KR: In “The Bad Graft” a Joshua tree possesses a woman who has eloped with her new lover. I was trying to feel into what would be awful, incredible, mystifying about human life if I was a tree narrator, a tree spirit now trapped inside a human body, aware that it is changing, aging, and dying on a human timeline. I loved Ovid’s The Metamorphoses when I was a kid. I feel like everyone knows someone who’s existential bargain was to become a tree, whose escape came at a terrible price, the way that Daphne lost herself to save her life. A transformation is predicated on an extinction, the end of an earlier life or arrangement. In this story, I play with that notion by having the tree become a woman.
I think about it in a similar way as a child narrator, where it’s about what looks absurd or what would be surprising about how humans live to someone new to that experience. Kids are so new on the planet that they can still register surprise at things that we become numb to. In the case of a Joshua tree experiencing life in a human body, I had an estranged vantage on the things we take for granted. I thought: I bet we move so fast, I bet that’s really queasy to be a tree in a human body, I bet human life feels like an eye blink if your lifespan is thousands of years. It was a powerful way to reflect on what we are. If you’ve ever seen those crazy Joshua trees that look so Seussical and weird, like they’re just holding their poses until you turn around and then start moving in muppet-like ways—I was like, this tree must love to dance. It already looks like a crazy primordial frozen ballerina. I feel like I approach fiction like my children in that sense, and that’s so much of the pleasure for me.
CL: You often utilize side characters to explore protagonists’ flaws. How do you view protagonists and utilize side characters in story development?
KR: Side characters are so necessary, to let you know what the rules of a world are, to call an unreliable narrator on their bullshit, for example. I internalized this rule that you couldn’t have a flat character, everyone had to be a full rounded character. But that’s actually not always possible. You don’t get to know everyone who shows up in a story in the way that you get to know someone whose consciousness is the filtration system for the story. I was just talking with a friend of mine, Kaveh Akbar—I recommend his gorgeous book Martyr. One of the things I love about it is that characters float through and they’ll just kind of casually toss off some lines that detonate what the narrator’s been telling you, or offer a slant perspective from the periphery of the story you’ve been following that in some way reconfigures your understanding. Arguments with characters that aren’t necessarily the central consciousness are great for revealing different interpretations of what might be happening. I was thinking about “The Bad Graft,” where there’s this ranger who shows up—he was such a fun character to imagine, that Lynchian character who’s both avuncular and maybe your future murderer, you really can’t tell. But he lets you know what season it is, what’s at stake, what’s happening, where you are. He offers information beyond the ken of what the protagonists can see or know. It’s fun to have a character like that to orient you.
RE: I read a lot of your interview about like what you take inspiration from and myths, legends, and traditional fairytales are often cited as inspiration for your stories and their origins. How do you reform them to fit contemporary literature and your own formatting?
KR: I love fairytales and I love myths. “Vampires in the Lemon Grove” is one that I was just thinking of, everyone’s so familiar with that character, the vampire. The devil also has this archetypal resonance that goes back a long way. One practical thing that's fun about inviting a character you can assume many readers have a relationship to is that it's easy to then subvert that, to riff on what an audience assumes about an archetypal figure or a fairytale structure. It's fun to play around with that. Everybody thinks they know a vampire, so it was fun to have this terrifying monster asking, what happens in that yawning Sunday of your eternal life? How will I survive the afterlife of my addiction to blood, to the myths I believed for so long about who I am, what I need to exist in time? I think that that's what sobriety can feel like to many people after addiction, like if there's an afterlife what's that like. So this is the sober vampire who is in a monogamous union, and he's like, “Oh boy, it's been Sunday for a long time…” There's something comic to me about that, a character or myth or fairytale you think you know coming in through the side door, using it to explore to something it doesn't typically explore. The Minotaur is another one, what sending that Greek myth of the monster in the maze on a collision course with the myth of the American West as a treasure chest for the taking does. You’re invited to look at the history we tell about colonization and its violence in a different way.
RE: There's a story in Vampires in the Lemon Grove called “The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach,”about seagulls who time travel and collect things. Where did the inspiration for that story come from?
KR: Probably too many Quantum Leap episodes as a kid. I love Ray Bradbury, who doesn't love time travel? I like the idea of pulling out like a lynchpin, literalizing that idea. Having something so tiny, like a little stud in the wall that you pull out and everything changes. You can live that moment in the present right, where you're like, wow, I missed my appointment by three minutes and the rest of my life you can feel like something got derailed— I think that's a pretty human experience. This character has that experience that this is not the life I'm meant to be living, this is not the life my family is supposed to be living. I think that's a horrifying feature of our reality, completely arbitrary fortune in a system that can be really very grimly predictable, designed to create and maintain better outcomes for some people than other people. It was a kind of experiment. I hope the emotions feel pretty universal. I think everyone knows that feeling of getting derailed from the trajectory that felt like your destiny. One tiny change can grow exponentially, one missed appointment or chance encounter can alter the course of an entire life story. That can be an exciting thing, but often a shocking and sad thing. I think more often it's the case that something goes awry and some kind of inertial forces take over, confronting that a little bit—just how arbitrary a lot of what becomes your life story truly is.
EP: In Swamplandia! the story is associated with and driven by the environment and you write about south Florida specifically as being such a surreal and liminal place. To what extent does your own experience living in a place affect how you write about it?
KR: I miss living in Florida a lot. The landscape that you were a child in really is part of you. It never will not be—the whole vocabulary of your thinking and your emotional world came from a call and response with that ecosystem and landscape and culture. Living there was a real gift as a writer. People ask me sometimes, why do you write this speculative stuff, and if you have lived in south Florida it just feels like realism there. There’s extreme weather to shape that place, there’s such a polyphony of culture and languages, the kudzu sprawl. There’s a humid fecundity to that place that still shows up in the way I write. I miss living there, I think different kinds of stories occurred to me because I was a child there.
RE: There's a specific format and tone of voice combined with an atmosphere of pressure that seems to be reflected throughout many of your short stories. Is this due to authors you’re inspired by or your own experiences?
KR: I think people write to their own rhythms. In my first collection, when I look at it now, the settings are different, the dilemmas are different, but some of those characters feel like siblings to me. Even if they're moving from the American West to a school for the daughters of werewolves, they could all sort of be brothers and sisters in a way. The story shapes kind of have a kinship. I feel like I’m always drawn to write these giant, P.T. Barnum-esque crazy worlds that then climax in their tightest corners. That seems to be my default setting. I was just reading Mary Robison’s Yours, which is so distilled and crystalline it makes me cry every time I read it. I don’t know how somebody can do that in one page.
In St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves there's a story where this girl gets stuck in a giant prehistoric shell, and I was like, well I guess I just like to literalize a metaphor and then strand a child inside it. For a long time that was what a story was to me, and it's changing a little bit. It's funny to track that. I wrote a story when I moved to Portland, “The Prospectors.” I had never seen a ski lift, they’re terrifying. Nothing I could come up with is as weird as humans beings deciding, at the base of a mountain: why don't we sit on a chair and hoist it on a rope up to the peak? Then we’ll strap beaks to our feet and slide down the mountain and that's a sport. I find that insane, coming from Miami. I imagined that I’d create a giant world and have the story climax in its tightest corner again, but in this case these two women are able to return to their earthly lives and it felt like real progress for me, like a human victory—my imagination is evolving somewhat, all is not lost.
NM: Personally I read Orange World and Other Stories as the exploration of different ways one can be alive and conscious and the line between life and death, like sharing a body with the tree spirit or falling for a bog girl. Did you write these stories with a central theme in mind or do you just write a couple stories that feel like they belong in the same collection and keep writing into it?
KR: Usually I'll write four and then I'll say okay, I am now seeing what I'm up to this time around. These collections are never super long—the stories are long, but the collections are eight to ten stories. I have another one coming out after this novel that I imagine will be about the same suite of stories. I heard George Saunders say once that he doesn't have an infinite cast of characters that he can bring to life on paper, so it’s been interesting to chart that, to learn what kinds of people and animals I can make live on paper. I often feel less like I am inventing a character than I am listening to whatever voice is coming in on my particular antenna or what I’m able to conjure on my desktop computer, the fiction writer’s Ouija board. I can't conjure everybody, there are real limits. Sometimes it's good, if you've internalized the sense of the kind of writer you are, to push yourself—you might be wrong. In the first collection, it's these kind of wall-eyed, grief-haunted child narrators or young adolescents and one very old man on the threshold of death where he weirdly felt like an adolescent to me in his own way, on the cusp of another great transformation.
With Orange World and the bog bodies, I was thinking a lot about landscape, and the moment where that dream becomes a nightmare. Like these people in “The Bad Graft,” they are setting out on their honeymoon, they are eloping. There's a story called “The Prospectors” where these two best friends are escaping an abusive situation to the West. It's another myth of the West and infinite possibility that then collides with a pretty dark and very constrained reality. Putting a collection together feels like a mixtape to me, like a Spotify mix. There are a couple stories that aren't in Orange World that felt like weaker versions of stories that are there or that didn't quite fit. Those get kicked down the road for some future collection maybe.
EP: You touched upon this a little bit earlier, but what works and themes of other writers have you been influenced by, like how Swamplandia! begins with a Lewis Carroll note? And in turn how would you like your work to influence others?
KR: I think about the writers that meant a lot to me when I was growing up. Maureen McLane is a writer I love now and she describes the books that have had a lasting impact on her living as “deep seas to dream in and make a self.” Certain books, like Their Eyes Were Watching God and Dune and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, I read at the age I was when I truly needed a home and a world and an antidote to loneliness, when I needed perspective and the chance to live other lives. I hope my books can be that for some readers, I hope they can spark other people's imaginations. It’s always a collaboration. I'm only a writer because I read people who did this sorcerer-ous thing for me, opening a world where writer, reader, and character merge. I'm always so happy when people tell me they read something and it made them want to write or create in some way. That is the hope. What a weird spooky thing to get to meld your dream DNA. No book is ever written in isolation, in a vacuum. Every writer I've ever read is collaborating with me when I write anything. I wouldn't have written “Reeling for the Empire” if I hadn't read Octavia Butler and Franz Kafka, and nonfiction accounts of feminist textile uprsisings in Japan. So maybe that's it—my best hope and wish is for my books to be kindling for a reader’s own creativity, to be a world that spins on inside them after they finish the last line, a light they can carry and use to read their own life story.