12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kirsten Allio
Kirstin Allio receivedthe Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize from FC2 for her 2024 storycollection, 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 (Universityof 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, NewEngland Review, The Paris Review Daily, Plume, Poetry Northwest, The SouthernReview, Subtropics and elsewhere. Her honors and awards include theNational Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award, the PEN/O. Henry Prize, theAmerican Short(er) Fiction Prize from American Short Fiction, chosen byDanielle Dutton, and fellowships from Brown University’s Howard Foundation andMacDowell. She holds an MFA from Brown, and lives in Providence, RI.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your mostrecent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book, Garner, isa morality tale set in 1920s New Hampshire that chronicles an individuated,city sensibility encroaching on tradition and communal repression in a smallrural town. A mystified layer or two deeper, it’s a rape novel. I learned, bywriting, that I write in search of moral clarity. If there’s a moral formulationfor being an artist it’s shaky, but the sense of calling is true. Becoming awriter with my first book stuck me in the moral crosshairs between service andself-fulfillment, where I remain.
2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetryor non-fiction?
That feeling of being both enchanted and overwhelmed by reality,and wanting to grasp it, understand, metabolize, reproduce it… An analogy for realistfiction 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 firstdrafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out ofcopious notes?
I am slow. Time itself is a key player, a creative agent. I meanthat time actually does the work of composition and editing for me. I’lltypically take a flurry of fragmentary notes, impressionistic, outside thehabitat of my office. Many stories start on trains, or sitting in somebodyelse’s park, somebody else’s city. Layer by layer, over years, I build up astory.
4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Areyou an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, orare you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I usually know whether any given material—and it could be as smallas a single image, or an exchange, or a glob of language—is a poem or shortstory or a novel. The seed material is sensitive to genre, as if it had a DNA. Ihave never turned a poem or a story into a novel. A novel has never turned outto be a story. I don’t know why this is so unerring for me.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creativeprocess? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love to read out loud, and every single time, I’m shocked by howeffective an editing tool it is, a truth serum. When I read from publishedwork, I always edit at the last minute, and then again in real time, and itkind of kills me, because of course it’s too late to change on the page, andthen I vow to read out loud at all stages of writing…
So in that sense, public readings are essential to my writingprocess, and I’m grateful to friends and strangers who attend.
I shrink, however, from explaining my work, from claims ofaboutness. Of course meaning isn’t finite, can’t be depleted, but I have a fearof foreclosing, cauterizing infinite meaning if I suggest one meaning oranother. I’m also just not very fluent in summary. I could never write a bookreport in grade school. I feel there’s a risk of betraying the fiction if Italk about it in the language of nonfiction, or conversation, or explication—ifI translate it into that unholy aboutness. Or maybe I’m the actor who has areally tinny, tiny voice, who’s just kind of a bimbo outside the film. I don’twant to disappointment readers.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? Whatkinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you eventhink the current questions are?
Theories of the human condition! Theories of feminism—the koan-likequestion 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 largerculture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer shouldbe?
When a writer or a philosopher comes up with some gem of ajustification, I’m the first to scribble it down on my napkin. Hannah Arendt,in Men in Dark Times: “The storyreveals the meaning of what otherwise would remain an unbearable sequence ofsheer happenings.” Art saves lives, and that kind of thing. I am always, alwaystrying to justify my place on the planet. I can justify a calling—I feel I haveone—but I cannot justify art-making as separate, isolated from, or even aboveservice to humanity. So there I dwell, unjustified, called, uncomfortable,writing.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editordifficult or essential (or both)?
It’s a rare pleasure.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarilygiven 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 (poetryto 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 youeven 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 returnfor (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
In recent years I’ve been experimenting with collage. It’s an admissionof defeat, and a real-time commitment, to kick writing out of my office andtake 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 oldfencing mask I’ve been working on for 10 years with beads and feathers, oddjewelry and Lenin lapel pins from a summer in the USSR when I was 14. I’m awedby how much time it takes to make decisions in visual art. Part of the processis 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, butare 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, tectonicallyshifting 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 realizeI’ve been fixated on returning to things I’ve let lapse, picking up threads andweaving old time into the present. I have never grown a garden. I would like tohave the kind of time to try.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what wouldit be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had younot been a writer?
I was a great waitress. I wanted to be a dancer. I could havetaught 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, andthen modern dance. So I recognized the feeling when writing swept me off myfeet. That was 30 years ago this fall—1994, I had transferred to NYU fromdancing—the institution at the time took “life experience” credits, the jackpotof financial aid—and I walked in to a creative writing workshop, having neverheard of creative writing. That first class was all it took, thanks toProfessor Chris Spain. I wanted to get those feelings into words in my barehands.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the lastgreat film?
I have just seen the greatest film I’ve seen in years. It’s calledLook Into My Eyes, and it’s a newdocumentary by the painterly, underworldly, hauntingly brilliant filmmaker LanaWilson, about psychics in New York City.
I hated Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairosuntil I loved it, at the very end. It is a novel built for its ending, when ananti-love love story gives way to grief for the lost communist dream, for anEast Germany that might have veered away and solidified against capitalism to becomewhat seems like an oxymoron, a humane nation. In Erpenbeck’s telling, the pullof plentiful, cheap goods and the similarly cheap frisson of competition weretoo strong, and here we are.
20 - What are you currently working on?
An experimental, hybrid story constellation of tautly codediterations, inter-referential lyrics, frame-grabs from a contemporarycollective subconscious—working title Matterand Pattern. Theme and variation are the dangers of emotional rationality,the violence of common sense, feminist philosophy and aphorism, femaleexperience as negative space. Pattern acts on matter, matter provides contentfor pattern, language is both analysis and synthesis, thinking and knowing.
