Kirstin Allio

Luke Rolfes: It’s a treat to talk with writer Kirstin Allio today. Allio is the author of four books, most recently the collection Double-Check for Sleeping Children which won the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize and is published by FC2 Press. This is one of my favorite books of the year so far, and I can’t wait to hear about the process of writing it. 

I’m curious, Kirstin, about the book’s genesis, most specifically how you culled your own work for this collection. Could you talk broadly about the construction of Double-Check for Sleeping Children? Did you look for similarities in your previously written stories, or did you write works specifically for a certain theme?  And how did you know when you generated enough material for a book? 

Kirstin Allio: Hi Luke! Thank you again for selecting my story “Naiad” for your wonderful Laurel Review! And thanks for the chance to range through the collection and converse here. 

 “Naiad” is part of what I think of as the long, dark, opening scene; the gothic, birth-canal beginning of the collection. I imagine the first five stories as minor chords on a theme; maybe even a ritual exorcising of cultural violence against the feminine. There’s definitely an underlying mythic logic—a recurring dread, and a sense of uncanny recognition of that recurrence. 

In terms of putting the collection together, at around ten stories out of twenty, I felt they might be more than the sum of their parts, and that there might be a central narrative and aesthetic intelligence. I’d like to think that individual stories even pulled toward one another, or sent out feelers, threads, willing a larger weave, as themes seem to last longer than characters…

LR: I love the variety you offer—voice and style. Some of the stories are flash fiction. Some are written in short fragments/vignettes. Some of the pieces appear in verse—poem-stories, so to speak. Can you talk about the spectrum of style in this book, and why you chose to present this wide range to the reader?

KA: A big part of contriving a whole was figuring out how to accommodate that huge—vertiginous—variation, so that no matter their boundaries, or their duration, all the stories operate past the point where change in scale becomes change in kind, where quantity becomes quality.

I took courage and inspiration from two superb collections: Stuart Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago and Zadie Smith’s Grand Union both assume that short and long, fragment and whole forms work together and bring out the best in each other between two covers. 

Working in poetry has made me alert to the form or genre that’s the best vessel, or vehicle for the material. I’m not sure if I can derive a set of rules, and I don’t show up to a given story form-first, or content-first. It’s less like pouring wine (content) into a wine glass (form), or even choosing a heavy-bottomed vase for heavy-headed hydrangeas, and more like form and content as give-and-take.

There’s also the practical matter of relief and renewal in switching between expansive and contractive modes! I love constraint and compression. I love lineation, and word by word, as in poetry. I love the surprising, even off-kilter, off-length of the novella. I suspect that going back and forth between minimal and maximal makes each mode more intensely itself. 

LR: Kind of a follow up to that: In the foreword, Matt Bell stresses the importance of reading your work closely—“there is no other way to read this book.” I admire the numerous layers of setting and character that you present to us, but when an idea for a story comes to you, how/when do you decide what form it will take?  These narratives are, to my ear, nuanced and lush enough to create novels out of, yet you’ve chosen to contain them within the boundaries of short fiction. Since you’ve written everything from flash to novels, can you discuss how your tactics change when you tackle different lengths?  

KA: Now I’m a dog with a bone on this form and content question! There’s something of the old creative writing saw show versus tell that’s almost parallel to form and content. I realize it’s officially show don’t tell, but in my experience, there’s definitely a time for tell too. I was reading a review of a spoofy Edinburgh Fringe Festival play about the Gwyneth Paltrow ski trial in which the star-struck defense lawyer is played by a ventriloquist’s dummy. In this case, the puppet is the form, the “show,” and the dialogue is the “tell.” 

Or the words of Marshall McLuhan, that seem to just keep renewing their relevance: The media is the message. The recent Democratic National Convention, for example, is a whole different story on TV versus in the newspaper, on Twitter versus told by a run-in with a run-on neighbor. 

Two stories in the collection that are especially form-forward are the first story, “The Sea,” structured in alternating lines of two, staggered strands of the same story, an ebb and flow, warp and weft of the sea, a breathing pattern, and “Carte Blanche,” a flaneuse story—a walking story—the longest story, in which Hope, the protagonist, has miles to cover both on the ground, all the way up Broadway’s slanted spine of Manhattan to see her therapist, and internally, emotionally, as she works over and over, through and maybe finally through, her failed love affair. 

LR: Since you have a wide arsenal of style, I’m curious about your influences. Which writers do you see as part of your “writing family tree”?

KA: My short story influences are the longest and most primally held. I had transferred to NYU after giving up dance, never heard of “creative writing,” when some lucky star twinkled, and I found myself inside a starburst, if that’s how starbursts work, in that first, timed free-write of my very first workshop. The prompt was “best light.” I was locked in, everything was suddenly clear, including the first reading assignment, which was Amy Hempel’s “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Was Buried.” So Amy Hempel. Mary Gaitskill, Flannery O’Connor, Grace Paley. When I moved up to Providence for my MFA, Diane Williams, Joy Williams, Lydia Davis (who was a visiting professor), George Saunders’ (same year, a visiting professor) CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. Rosmarie Waldrop’s prose poems, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s prose poems. The literary magazines The Quarterly, Fence, Conjunctions. Guy Davenport, Deborah Eisenberg, Denis Johnson. 

I name-drop Zadie Smith and Grace Paley in “Ambush”—an invocation. “Inheritance” is built on the chassis of the opening of Flannery O’Connor’s “Artificial Nigger” from the collection A Good Man Is Hard To Find.

There is in fact a lot of closely-held, originary NYC in this collection. Both “The Sea” and “Carte Blanche” were seeded in the mid-1990s. I’ve carried them around for decades, and like the human body, which sloughs off and trades up every last cell in cycles, the stories have replaced themselves word for word every seven years. Like the body, a biological paradox, they’re the same and also absolutely different. 

LR: The story “Ambush” is incredibly tense. A mother, staying in a motel, encounters a hunter on the road, and then realizes later that he might be stalking or following her. This experience is specific and universal at the same time. I’d love to hear about this piece. Was the original idea for this story to place the mother in this moment of extreme anxiety, or did this moment come organically in the process of building this narrative? 

KA: “Ambush” could have been a novel. In writing about it, I fear leaving something out—it’s possibly overbuilt, or over-packed, or at least packed incredibly densely. 

On the other hand, it could have been a poem, and it’s part of a body of my work that deals with women in mythology, or mythological metaphor. I came across Eavan Boland’s “Daphne with Her Thighs in Bark” when I was deep in “Ambush,” whose protagonist is Daphne, and I took it as metaphysical confirmation. Born in Ireland in 1944, Boland was writing out of a time and place “where the word ‘woman’ and the word ‘poet’ seemed to be in some sort of magnetic opposition to each other,” as she says in an online interview. Here’s the first stretch of the poem:

LR: I would say one of my favorite things about your work is that I cannot predict what will happen next, yet the actions in the stories seem inevitable. For example, in the ending scene of “Mother’s Helper” a twelve-year-old neighbor girl comes over, breaks down in tears, and asks if the narrator will nurse her. The scene is vividly unnerving, yet somehow feels bound to happen. Did this scene feel inevitable when you were writing it? Are the actions of characters something you plan out ahead of time or something you feel in your gut?

KA: “Mother’s Helper” is the rare story in which I had an anchor. Usually I’m allergic to outlines, even direction, as the suspense of discovery in real-time—real writing time—tends to give the story its suspense and alive-ness. The construction of this story felt like working backwards from the nursing scene, the anchor, but what a jarring, troubling, defamiliarized anchor: the act of breastfeeding outside kinship and an expected age a kind mystical initiation, or a straight-up transgression. If the story were a poem, I’d be tempted to use the words libidinal and libation.

LR: In “Naiad,” a woman named Bethany battles alcoholism. After Bethany’s daughter confesses that she lost her virginity, you write: “And before she could check herself, Bethany heard her own terrible wail, It happened to me in seventh grade, too! The moment the words were out, she knew the mistake she’d made. Never had she betrayed herself like that before.” It occurs to me that this moment represents a larger theme in this book. It seems that many of these stories are about secrets (wants, desires, skeletons in the closet, etc.) and how long and to what lengths characters go to keep these secrets hidden from the outside world. Any thoughts on that? How important is it to you that characters have something to hide?   

KA: Thanks for bringing this to the fore! Sometimes I imagine stories are secrets, models to scale of worlds mapped on the coordinates of secrets and lies. Bethany is feeding off her daughter Jewel. She tries to connect, even embed, through a kind of confession that’s also abasement, and Jewel recoils, and rebuffs her. Oh how Jewel wants to transcend her mother! The story is also about social class, and class-jumping—stereotypes and impersonation and masks. Secrets. 

I wrote and illustrated an essay, or artist’s statement, introducing the collection for FC2. One of the illustrations is a photograph of the high school track, wreathed in fog, where the middle section of “Naiad” is set, where Bethany goes in desperation to outrun her urge to drink (“Demon impulses hurled themselves at her empty car”), and to fortify herself in the presence of other humans. She’s all up in her own foggy, painful consciousness, circling, hoping to be distracted and cleared by others’ lives and conversations.

LR: Finally, I’m interested in the last story in the collection, “Time of the Testudinidae.” This short piece is written in fragments/vignettes. The narrator contemplates place and time through the metaphor of a turtle. What was your inspiration, and why did you decide this was the right ending note for the collection? 

KA: “Time of the Testudinidae” is where I want to be, which is on the move, another walking story, or a journey story, like “Carte Blanche,” which I mentioned, and like “Uncollected Territories,” its near kin, a hyper-realist stream, or inventory of consciousness. It’s a prose poem, a lyric fiction, a memory palace, and it makes no concessions to the ugliness of plot. I love plot but it’s ugly as sin. 

It’s the ending story because it’s sort of a one-woman fugue, contrapuntal in the sense of invoking, humming many of the themes played across the collection: motherhood, interiority, time, technology, guilt, shame, form, the scale and transgression of humans in nature. 

LR: This is a mesmerizing and unique collection, Kirstin. I can’t thank you enough for spending some time with us today. What’s next for you and your writing?

KA: Thank you again! I’m so grateful for the opportunity to talk about these stories and the collection overall. It’s my second short story collection, and something of a continuation, maybe even an entangling of the first. Where Clothed, Female Figure was more traditional in its focus on women’s lives in the realm of domestic realism, Double-Check for Sleeping Children taps into mythic realism—to tell old stories in a new way—and dwells on gender. 

I’m writing poems lately, and will begin sending out a novel, Burrows, that actually comes out of the same raw, charged energy of sex and addiction as “Naiad.” I’m working on pitch material—here’s a try: 

A furious lyric of love and loss, in the spirit of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red and Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, Burrows is the darkly magical dilation of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in Seattle in the early 2000s…