Kathe Koja | Writing about writing

Jeff VanderMeer interviews me for “The Weird” and we talk about Angela Carter, Catholicism as punk rock, and why that mouth under your pillow is not really such a good thing.

Yes, it was an organizational desk note to self (I’m writing a new novel), but it works as a signpost too. When we read, no matter how particular the character, the subject really is everyone (and everyone else). And when we write, it’s the same.

Back to work!

This essay originally appeared in an anthology of first stories from writers such as Robert Bloch, Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Hand, and others, including me. Not my very first published story (that would be “Happy Birthday, Kim White”), but “Distances” was the first story of mine to be published to a wider audience. This reappraisal of the story was written in 2003.  It’s been nine years; four more to go before lucky 13 rolls around again.

Thirteen: lucky number, jinx number.  Unseen on clocks, no part of time; the unmarked floor in a high rise; it even carries the distinction of its own specific phobia (triskaidekaphobia, if you’re interested).  Thirteen years ago, Asimov’s SF Magazine published my short story “Distances” in its Mid-December issue, a story later reprinted in Gardner Dozois’ prestigious YEAR’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION anthology, a story that got me noticed and effectively launched my writing career.

Where were you, thirteen years ago?  What were you doing, where were you living, how did you feel about your life?  Can you remember, will you never forget?  Does it seem like a long time ago?  I remember being a nervous novice writer four years out of the Clarion workshop, with a three-year-old son who is, as I write this, a sophomore in high school.  If you asked him, he might tell you that thirteen years is a very long time indeed.

For the characters in this story time moves elliptically: in bursts, in wide circles; it drags and lags and leaps too fast for counting.  For them, as for anyone whose inner and outer landscapes are at large variance or outright war — those in physical pain, or enduring great want, or separated by iron circumstance from the ones they love — this is always so.  Desire is a chasm steeper than time, unbridgeable as deep space; you may travel it obsessively but grow no nearer to what you seek.   Like the Red Queen and Alice, it will take all the running you can do simply to stay where you are.

I see this story through a lens of time, of other stories (and novels) conceived and completed, of discoveries made in the landscape of my own life, most of them good, all of them necessary.  If I were to write “Distances” over again today, would the same things happen to those characters, the same resolution be reached?  I’m not sure.  “Write what you know,” is the old good advice, but what we know, or think we know, changes as we do, becomes deeper or dearer or paradoxically disappears; growth is unpredictable, pain is sure, and vision is the tool a writer uses to cope with both, on the page and (we hope) in the life that makes the page possible.  All of it, of course, marinated in the brine of time, which has a way of altering perception, of diluting — or concentrating — desire, making of one thing another quite different, without perceptible effort on our part.  It is a kind of magic trick, but a very serious and permanent one.  Just like life itself.

Thirteen years ago; thirteen years to come; and this second, now, sandwiched in their middle, this slice of time where the once-made world of “Distances” is read again and made, by you, its reader, into a living place: where technology flowers, and ambition rages, and two hands reach out to clasp together,  in the airless dome of silent space and the great warm darkness of the mind. …Time is distance.  See you in thirteen years.

OK, I’m being facetious, sometimes it is very difficult, maddening, even, to continue to create in the face of opposition: of poverty: of indifference; of that strange inner welling of resistance that occurs, at times, when you sit down at the desk, the keyboard, the easel, whichever, day after day after day. But this tells only part of the truth of the artist’s life: and the greater part is joy.

It is so fun to make fierce, cool, interesting, original things: using words or paint or sounds or whatever your media may be. That’s the secret.  We express our tortured souls, sure, but in the end, the vast and human-sized end … it’s fun.

… or, how we meet, surprise, and greet each other. Last night Rick and I went to the Book Beat bookstore for a reading and signing by Joseph Mattson, where stories were told of snow and black ice in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and a chomped-off fingertip in a flustered California hospital, and admirers toting bags of illegal samples to signings to thank the author (not last night!). J. Mattson was great fun and we were glad to have met him.

But before the event began, there in the stacks, I saw two artists I already knew, whose work I admire intensely, conjoined between covers – Odd Nerdrum and Christopher Marlowe, one imagining the other in a piece called “Marlowe” in a book called How We Cheat Each Other.

Is there a large intense hilarious affair going on at all times, wherein mind uses art to speak to mind, and distance is just a fiction (albeit one sometimes coated with black ice)? Maybe the formula is distance equals speed times time, divided by art. Demonstrably, it works.

Who’s the DJ when you read?

Full disclosure: every novel I write has a soundtrack; Headlong had a lot of Pixies, for example, and Under the Poppy and The Mercury Waltz were buoyed and sustained by Rufus Wainwright, Roxy Music, CocoRosie, Lhasa de Sela, Teddy Thompson …. But those were the songs I heard, wanted to hear, chose to hear, when I wrote the books. Would they be your auditory choices, too? They would be indelibly when you were done reading, wouldn’t they?

And do you really need sound effects?

But I haven’t heard BookTrack in action yet, so I ought to listen, first, before I judge, right?

“[I]t’s been said that the opening line sells a book whilst the closing line sells the author’s next one.” Hmmm. Really? Ugh. Anyway, 100 lines to open the door.

I offer

“You must and will suppose (fair or foul reader, but where’s the difference?) that I suppose a heap of happenings that I had no eye to eye knowledge of or concerning.”

from one of the books I love most in the world, Anthony Burgess’ A Dead Man in Deptford which if you have not read, consider yourself importuned to do so stat, and enjoy its magnificent last line for yourself.

Normally I start the other way around – with the image of characters; with the words – but this time I began a new way: with paper; with beeswaxed thread; with glue. With patience and excitement and frustration. With elation, when, at the end of the evening’s work, I held in my hand a physical book, made entirely by myself.

There’s something very exciting about this, for a writer whose work has always gone – as if down a conduit; off to the pixies – into the publishing process, to reemerge months and months later, printed and bound. Something greatly pleasurable; something incendiary.

And all thanks to Leon Johnson and Megan O’Connell and Signal-Return, based in Detroit’s historic Eastern Market, making history there themselves, page by page.

… the puppets played: humans playing puppets, and a puppet among them, gleeful and self-contained, borne by a puppeteer in a plague mask and a long black cloak … Watching the characters of the Poppy come to life in this way meant something different to those present who were new to the story; those who knew the story well; the actors; and the writer. 

Having considered and created the script for this performance event – an exercise in performative fiction: not only a script, not only the book, but an ongoing amalgamation of the story itself, incorporating the performed events that came before this evening, with the page and its language as the guide – to watch it happen in real time, real actors and a real puppet and the shadow puppetry on the screen; the video projections of earlier moments – call them chapters – of the story, was a way to see the story in motion, to observe and learn … And it was a joy.

And being able to do so at the Detroit Institute of Arts, surrounded and buoyed by art, the doors of our playing space facing the puppet cases holding citizens of the stage, just like us – it was an amazing evening. One night only, standing room only (we had to turn away some would-be patrons), ephemeral and unforgettable – what a show!

[Photo credits: KK, Rick Lieder, Diane Cheklich, Gary Schwartz, KK. Actors: Brooklyn Dimitrie, Vanessa Ellen Hentschel, Mona Lucuis, Steven O'Brien, Annabelle Young.  Puppeteer: Megan Harris, with Pan Loudermilk.]

Do stop and see the puppets, won’t you? [Graphic design by Jackie Zimmerman.]