"To Endlessly Scratch at Those Surfaces": An Interview With Kirsten Kaschock

Kirsten Kaschock is the author of two books of poetry: A Beautiful Name for a Girl (Slope Editions) and Unfathoms (Ahsahta Press).  Her first novel, Sleight, was recently published by Coffee House Press.  She has earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia and is currently a doctoral fellow in dance at Temple University.  Kirsten lives with her three sons and their father in Philadelphia.

Her story "The Fisherwoman's Daughter" appears in Issue Thirty of The Collagist.

Here, Kirsten Kaschock speaks to interviewer Joseph Scapellato about stories-under-stories, momentum, and content through accretion.

1. Can you tell us about the origin of “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter”?  Where did this piece begin for you, and how did it get to here?

I’m a poet in one of my several lives.  This piece began, like many of my poems do, with its first few words and nothing else.  Those words happened to be the premise for a faerie tale: three impossible rivers, three fish.  Like many of my poems, it poured out during a single night.  A few insomniacal hours of following words down the screen, and the basic form was there.  I don’t think I could do that with a realistic short story, but the outline of a faerie tale is definite—like a mountain in the distance—so I headed that way and let the stuff I encountered just live there.  Later, I went back in, of course, to shore up the language and emphasize links that were only hinted at in the first draft.  I did sort-of catch the thing whole, though. 

2. I love this work’s thoughtful and playful engagement with myth, folktales, and fairy tales.  Here, we follow the story of a daughter (not a son) who journeys away from her mother (not a stepmother, not a father).  To what extent was it your conscious goal to work against the tropes of these forms?  What were you shooting for?

I am a daughter.  Emerging into adulthood, I modeled myself on and against my mother.  I guess I wasn’t working against mythic tropes so much as engaging with them in a way that engages me.  Very little about the piece came consciously, as a decision to subvert.  And despite its form, the story did not begin as an illustration of a moral lesson: any message it suggests emerged out of its coalescing materials.  That maybe explains its melancholia—the tale set out with little direction other than away. 

Similarly, instead of being called to heroism, Myrtle’s impetus is the need to leave an untenable position.  The second mother.  From there, she eventually arrives at the crux of the piece—that escape is not actually a quest.  The moon that, by rights of the form, should have been Myrtle’s Jiminy Cricket refuses to instruct her.  (How I loved and was petrified by Pinocchio...that donkey scene!)  I think children’s stories are so engaging because they are labyrinths.  The journeys that begin in daylight can contain other, darker, twisting passages: I used to joke about this deeply subtextual tagline for The Little Mermaid: “Sea nymph, seeking legs, needs to shut up and spread them.”  In my experience, the simplest stories never are.       

3. Do you have favorite myths, folktales, or fairy tales, particular ones you return to often?  (And if so, what do they give you that other works don’t?)

Yes: Hansel and Gretel, The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars (IV and V), Giselle.  These stories live underneath many of the stories I love, and they have other stories inside of them.  The Wizard of Oz retells and expands on Red Riding Hood, although how and why the wolf became a witch I am unsure.  They stay with me because they are uncanny: simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar.  Multiple.  I both see myself in the characters and am transported to other realities.  Works of all genres can engage in this doubling (trebling, quadrupling), although I am drawn to works where the nature of the characters are familiar and the worlds they inhabit—less so.  I do sometimes like the reverse.  The deeply resonant and the fantastical combine in ten-thousand ways.  To endlessly scratch at those surfaces is to lay bare the heart of mystery—to claw at the unknown.  That’s my thing.

4. For me, the most delightful moment in this piece is when Myrtle encounters the final river.  The journey has presented many surprises, and in a way, the reader has been in Myrtle’s shoes; but when she approaches the river of net, Myrtle shows she knows her world far more intimately than we do—she knows that “the river was there to catch her,” that “if she walked beside the river she would become her father,” and that if she waded in, she’d be become her mother’s catch and be “eaten everyday for years.”  Myrtle knows what to do: she eats the river.  This might be a weird question, but—as you were composing or revising—when, how, and/or why did you know that this needed to happen?

I didn’t.  That detail, and most of the other events of this story, happened during the writing.  I don’t make outlines, not even mental ones.  For poetry, this maybe doesn’t sound so strange.  But when I wrote my first novel, Sleight, it was the same, and that was a much higher climb.  There are moments when I realize something has to happen, but I am usually right on top of those moments.  With my novel—there was this click about two thirds of the way through when I knew how the book had to end.  But that was two-hundred pages I’d been tightroping with no net.  Maybe that’s it—I don’t tend to write with a net, so when Myrtle came across one, she had to find another use for it.  Her transformation took me by surprise.

5. I read in your bio that you’re a doctoral fellow in dance.  How has dance influenced your writing—both the product and the process?   (And has writing fiction influenced your approach to dance?)

Trusting momentum to carry me—I learned that from dance.  I studied ballet and modern dance technique, where there is a sincere concentration on perfecting the technical tools and the body itself.  These are tremendous disciplines.  But at a certain point, during creation and performance, if you don’t allow yourself to follow where your bodymind wants to go, you don’t get there.  Dance is filled with variations on a theme, with attention to rhythm and pacing and the building of content through accretion—small plot-less sections creating an overarching narrative that is more felt than articulated.  And yes, fiction has also influenced my dancing.  I now think of choreography as world-creation.  The stage can be, for a few minutes, an alternate reality; the movement sets the rules of that space and provides a doorway (or window or narrow fissure) through which an audience might enter.  The overlaps in these two practices are incredibly generative.  I could go on seriously and endlessly about how the two interact for me, with me, in me. 

6. What other writing projects are you working on right now?

(Surprise!) I’m currently writing a dissertation on the parallel compositional processes in writing and choreography.  Also, my second novel is happening.  It is set in a world that lacks blank space, and its protagonist is a girl named Tree (see Pinocchio).  In this world you have to pay, and pay dearly, for empty walls and white noise.  I’m just at the point where I’ve really set up house inside this book—it’s a good place to get to.  Finally, I am writing poems (I am always writing poems) about windows and numbers and multiple world-beginnings.  Worlds always fail, but always another follows and succeeds in failing differently.

7. What great books have you been reading recently? Are there any upcoming releases you're excited about?

Books that stuck with me hard this past year are Rikki Ducornet’s Netsuke, China Miéville’s Embassytown, Ursula LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven (old but still amazing), and the first half of Adam Novy’s The Avian Gospels.  I’m excited to read the second half of Novy’s (it was published in two books), and I have just ordered Matt Ruff’s Mirage.  And I absolutely cannot wait to get my hands on Amber Dermont’s The Starboard Sea.