Kate Petersen is a Stegner fellow at Stanford University, and holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She is at work on a novel and a book of stories.
Her story, "Jukebox," appears in Issue Forty-Nine of The Collagist.
Here, she speaks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about self awareness, self conciousness, and the proper order of things.
What was your process for writing “Jukebox”?
Many many many hours staring at “the glowing screen,” as my family calls it.
The speaker in this story is very self conscious, both about her story (“I know: you've heard this one before.”) and the way that she’s telling it (I’m thinking of the line “Anyway, this isn’t even the beginning. / This is a middle that looks like a beginning.”). Could you talk about writing this speaker who is very self-aware?
Interesting question, and I’m intrigued that you use both “self-conscious” and “self-aware,” which strike me as two very different modes.
But in any case, writing seems to me to be a terribly self-conscious sport. At least from the writing side, there’s none of that self-losing purported to happen in other art. Acute, uncomfortable self-awareness seems definitional to the act—for me, anyways.
In a third-person story, in which a writer disappears behind her imagined world (or aims to), some of a writer’s energy gets tied up in masking that self-consciousness, pushing it beneath the surface of the story, making her choices seem invisible and inevitable. To a certain extent, one senses this happening in many first person stories and novels, as well.
But in “Jukebox,” rather than masking that narratorial self-consciousness, I wondered whether I could harness it to a sort of advantage by leaving it opened up. Whether fronting a certain amount of worry over the telling itself might not torque the story in interesting ways—especially because the story is all about the very deliberate working out of a problem, a woman trying to introduce light or at least order into a life that seems to keep certain things dark for her, and out-of-reach.
A secondary answer might be that teaching writing for a number of years now has made me ultra-aware of the "Whys" of everything: why does the story start here? Why does the story end here? Why is this sentence given this room, why the white space? Teaching means one has to have semi-legitimate answers for all of these questions, or at least have asked them. I was interested in what might happen if I fronted all of those very legitimate questions within a piece—whether the piece might then have to take them up and carry them somewhere.
The form seems to mimic the speaker’s self-consciousness: paragraphs are rarely more than a few sentences, often times only one line, and flit from subject to subject. Towards the end of the story, when the speaker seems to be reaching her peak of falling apart, we get fourteen one-line paragraphs. Could you talk about working with these lines? I’m also particularly interested in your process of revision, as I could see them being shifted around fairly easily.
I’m glad you see form and voice working in tandem here.
It’s hard for me to talk about working inside this piece line by line, because the story came to me early on as told, as Brooke’s voice—this cool, tough voice with heartbreak that fissures in. She wants to make a joke of all this, but it’s getting harder and harder to do. It’s very spoken story, which I heard first, and I did my best to honor that with the writing.
How does anyone revise? I wish I had a better answer. My current one is just hours, saying and reading these things back to yourself until a sort of logic introduces itself to the work, and sticks.
Order had to lock in for me, because it had to lock in for the narrator, Brooke. At bottom, “Jukebox” is all about a woman trying to put things in the right order, to do things in the right order, to find a logic to these almosts that will give her life a sort of meaning.
I don’t mean to suggest there’s not a sort of messiness to the leaps and returns Brooke makes. The piece is a deliberate working out of a problem in a way, and messy in the way that always is. I do sense a desperation that gets in at the end of the piece, where her experience-loop has left her empty-handed again, and she cannot quite believe it.
What have you read and loved recently?
Story-wise, I recently enjoyed Laurie Colwin’s The Lone Pilgrim, and am reading Edward P. Jones Lost in the City now, which is masterful. Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (out this month) is singular, winsome and heartrending. John Brandon’s A Million Heavens stayed with me—he is so good at doing the desert. And I’ve been relishing the stories in Tin House, especially the twilit hypnosis of Alexander Maksik’s “Trim Palace” in the winter issue. He gets the weight of a dog’s head on you exactly right.
What else have you been writing and working on?
I have been going headlong at a novel for awhile now, as well as some stories that make use of my long and storied love for Costco. I am about to read Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene” again for a project, and I’m looking forward to that.