"An Apology Cast Wide": An Interview with Kristen Gleason

Kristen Gleason was born in 1979. She has lived in California, Montana, Norway, and Georgia. Her writing has appeared in Quarterly West, Everyday Genius, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Caketrain, and elsewhere.

Her story, "The Rider," appeared in Issue Forty-Eight of The Collagist.

Here, Kristen Gleason talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about illiteracy, an old theatre, and a jacket with a polar bear on the back.

Please tell us about why you began writing “The Rider.” What inspired you?

When I lived in the north of the north, I visited a very old theatre and that theatre was the world in miniature and on the stage of that world everyone’s empathy disappeared. This story is an apology cast wide.

This story is packed with fresh, amusing combinations of words and odd turns of phrase (e.g., “her chicken-footed house” and “emptied them with double gulp”). Reading such lines, I was reminded of how a person might speak in a second language s/he isn’t completely fluent in. What effect(s) did you intend for these linguistic quirks to have on the reader?

I’m not really in control!

Mastery is gross. It isn’t real. I don’t know about you, but all my practice has made me illiterate, and in situations where my literacy is presumed, I like to be exposed as a fraud by someone getting it powerfully wrong, someone clean of practice and fresh as hell, just as I like to be the Bu who, in a different country, isn’t ruined yet. This could be a feeling that someone could feel, reading this story, if I were lucky.  

The story begins one night, then flashes back as the narrator recounts the events of the previous evening. What made you decide to include both these nights rather than just the one that makes up the majority of the narrative? What is the significance of bookending this piece with Bu recalling one night’s events only twenty-four hours later?

There was not just a hat. There was also a jacket. The jacket was made of black fleece. On the front it was plain, with a zipper, but on the back of the jacket—on the back of Bu—was a polar bear, teeth bared, paws raised. This was the jacket he wore during those few hours he was not waiting, but the jacket was too affecting to show, though he had to have worn it in the interim for the rest to even matter, so—two nights.

The final sentence really solidified the story’s emotional power for me: “Linn arrived in the snowy street, and the two of them laughed, not greeting me, not drinking what I'd bought, not warming by my fire, but watching me wait on the wide, wide stage of the world's theatre.” I noticed that the story begins and ends with Bu waiting and alone. What feelings were you trying to capture and/or evoke by leaving Bu in such an uncomfortable position?

The feeling of his jacket.

Let’s talk about the story’s title. Why “The Rider”? Who is this “unlucky rider, trapped on the spine of the white mare” that Bu speaks of? What does the rider represent to you?

No single thing. I’d been looking at Theodor Kittelsen’s Gutt på hvit hest

What writing projects are you working on now?

A novel about a fake poet.

What have you read recently that you are eager to recommend?

Farnoosh Fathi’s Great Guns. I recently read and loved Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter. FrankensteinSpleen by Olive Moore.