Dawna Kemper is originally from the Midwest and has lived in Los Angeles since 1998. In addition to writing, she works as an editor and teaches at Santa Monica College. Her stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, The Florida Review, The Idaho Review, Quarterly West, Santa Monica Review, Shenandoah, and Zyzzyva. She has completed a collection of stories, and is working on her first novel. Her website is: www.dawnakemper.com.
Her story "Wardrobe" appears in Issue Forty-One of The Collagist.
Here, Dawna Kemper speaks with interviewer Melissa Goodrich of fabulism, chronology, critical density, and the novel vs. short stories, how she can't seem to stop writing them.
1. How do you begin a story this quick, brief, packed? Does it come to you all in a flash, or did you sense the brevity in its first few sentences, or...?
I can usually sense pretty quickly when a story will end up compressed into a very short piece. For instance, “Wardrobe” began with a very specific, contained situation. (Other flash fiction pieces I’ve written began with an image that I also knew would end up very focused and tightly packed.) So I could tell from the outset this one would be very short, that it would lose its critical density if expanded. I quickly drafted a loose version all at once, so I had the gist of it, then went back and paid close attention to working with language, paring away, but also striving to make each line and each image as highly charged as possible. I write longer, too, but I love working with these super-tight pieces that, hopefully, feel complete and weighted in some way, in spite of their brevity.
2. Near the end of sections, this piece quickly merges the fantastic with the tragic – very Aimee-Bender-eske (I’m especially thinking of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake), when the mother starts coughing up dolls’ clothes, when she “hurdles shopping carts leaps strollers jumps mailboxes—running running running.” Do you utilize the fantastic to buffer the tragic or help bloat it, like a very serious kind of caricature?
Yes, exactly (!) … both of those things, buffering and bloating. I think the fantastic can provide just enough distance from the tragic so we can bear to look at it. But it also can amplify the painful in surprising ways. I believe this works in much the same way as dreams. When we move through uncanny elements in a narrative, we’re making unconscious associations. We feelsomething working on us, and even if (maybe especially if!) we can’t really describe or define what this “thing” is, we are haunted by it. (This, of course, is what Kafka does so brilliantly, especially in a story like “A Country Doctor,” for instance.) So, I’m very interested in exploring and working along this border between the recognizable and the dream. For me, the two examples you mention (as clearly peculiar as they may seem) also expose some key thing about who the mother and the daughter are, individually and in relationship to each other. So I think fabulism also can reveal character in unconventional ways. (And, by the way, I’m a big fan of Aimee’s work, which, when I first started writing, opened up all sorts of possibilities for me about what a story could be.)
3. What guides your leaps in time? Would this story not survive (as well, as beautifully, at all) chronologically, or on a line like “I stare at my useless hands until they become something monstrous”?
More and more, I find that my stories, of any length, tend to blur or ignore chronology, and that this happens very intuitively while I’m writing. It just feels right to me. I think it may be because I’m more interested in how a story reflects a certain kind of consciousness than linear reality. I want to be careful not to over-explain or impose meaning, but I think that in the case of “Wardrobe” the mother’s death, in a troubling way, is not an end, at least for the daughter. Also, at least in my experience, during a painful event, time does not make any sense at all; we become utterly dislocated from “normal” time. So, to me, that disjointedness seems to make sense for this story.
4. What made your end-of-the-year reading list?
I read a lot, but I’m always, sadly, behind on new releases, it seems. So my favorite books this year weren’t necessarily published in 2012. In any case, here they are:
- The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt. Such a wild ride... and surprisingly poignant (I loved Eli Sisters as a narrator), and so darkly funny.
- The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector (the new translation by Benjamin Moser). I especially loved how the narrator self-reflexively examines the very act of storytelling in all of its false starts and forward lurches and existential questioning.
- Dancer by Colum McCann – So, so masterful. An exquisite fictional biography of Rudolph Nureyev. The writing is so beautiful and full of life I kept going back to re-read paragraphs.
- I Curse the River of Time by Per Petterson. This is steeped in such melancholy and loss, yet I found it also strangely, quietly funny. I felt such empathy for this hapless narrator.
- Parsifal by Jim Krusoe. Jim is my mentor and friend, and I think his books deserve a much wider audience. I think Parsifal is his best yet. It’s myth on a human scale… it’s also absurdly funny and dark and strange and, ultimately, moving.
- Taking Care by Joy Williams. I’ve read (nearly) all of her other books, but somehow missed this, her first story collection. I think Joy Williams is a genius; she’s certainly one of my idols. Her paragraphs pull you in and the next thing you know you’re pierced by something profound and totally unexpected. Her stories are utterly idiosyncratic in their sharp intelligence and dread and emotional heft. At the end of each story, I’m left stunned. And what more could one wish for as a reader?
5. What are you writing now—mostly the new novel? Or more tiny tragic tales? (Is one an antidote to the other?)
Though I’ve finished a story collection, I can’t seem to stop writing stories. So there you go. I’ve also written about 300 pages of a novel that ultimately wasn’t coming together, and which I’m now taking apart at the seams and rewriting. {sigh.} Yes, I do find it useful to break from the novel and go back to stories, from time to time; partly because I honestly enjoy writing them, but also (a) so I can actually finish something (!); and (b) because the stories, especially the very short pieces, keep me focused on voice, on language, on the shape of the piece, which is a very good thing to bring back to a sprawling work like a novel in progress. Or at least I hope so.