Interview with Kate in the DC Examiner
July 21, 2007: Q&A WITH A LOCAL AUTHOR
By Joanne Collings
Kate Blackwell is a native of Winston-Salem and has degrees from Wellesley and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She worked as a journalist for many years before moving to Washington, and became a freelance writer and editor and the co-author of several nonfiction books before turning to full-time work on fiction. She has taught fiction writing for many years at The Writer's Center in Bethesda and other places. Her collection of short stories, "You Wonít Remember This," was published this year by the Southern Methodist University Press. She is married and has three grown children. She lives in the District.
Q What made you decide to finally publish your short stories in book form?
A I didn't really start writing fiction until I was around 40. I had always planned to. ... I got a job as a reporter for a newspaper when I was out of grad school and stayed in nonfiction. But finally there was literally a moment when I was driving and I just pulled over and picked up a notebook and said, "I have got to start now!" And I started writing fiction, or started writing notes for it and then went on to write stories. I just took a long time; it wasn't that I was sending books out and not getting them published.
Getting a short-story collection published is not the easiest thing. And I had heard–I have a lot of writer friends–that they contacted agents and the agent would say, "Well, give me a novel first." I didn't want to wait that long. A good friend of mine gave me the names of four smaller publishers. SMU took [the book]. It took about four years from my first getting the collection together and the book. You can't be in a hurry.
Q What part does memory play in your stories?
A It plays a huge role. When I first started, [although] I was an avid reader of fiction, I didnít really know what I was doing. I just started writing what I saw in front of me, but more and more, I went back to things I remembered. When I am working with a character I don't understand, it helps when I share a memory with him, give him something that happened to me. That brings me closer to him. I've also discovered that there comes a point in writing a short story when you really need to know something that happened earlier, thebackstory. You don't want to give too much backstory first, you want to get into where you are–it immerses the reader in the situation. The earliest memories have the most emotional value.
Q How did you decide on the order of the stories for the collection?
A I puzzled over that for a long time, and I even did some research on how other writers did it. Certainly the order in which you wrote the stories is not a good choice. I tried to vary the voices. I ended up looking at whether [the story] was first person or third person to try not to get a clump ... together, and some of the stories are hard, so you don't want those together. Some readers say "I donít follow it; [the order], I skip around." And yet there is an intention to the order.
Q I know many people who love novels but do not read short stories. What current short-story writers would you tell them to try?
A The forms are very different, so there are reasons why someone might prefer the novel, to think into a world and remain there for a fairly long time. But I think that certain short-story writers give you that, albeit in microscopic form, like Alice Munro ... also William Trevor. Their stories are really whole lives. There are some short-story writers who give you one quick sensation; there are others that are much more leisurely and at the end you feel you have understood [a] person. And novellas are a great transition between the forms. '
Q More and more publishers are calling collections of short stories "novels in stories." Is this a genuine subgenre or a way to get around readers' preference of novels over short stories?
A I think itís the latter; it's just made up. I could be wrong, but I've thought about it a lot. Are you giving up the pleasures of either form for sort of a maverick? I think maybe you are. The great pleasure of a story to me is its structure, where something unfolds within these wonderful constraints, and at the end, you think, "OK, all of this is concerned about that." Sometimes if you are writing about the same character or different characters in the same town, however the story collection is arranged, you have the same constraints, the same challenges, and the stories are more like a slice of life. It doesn't do what either form [the short story or the novel] does best. It seems a lesser challenge for both writer and reader.
Q How do you name your characters?
A Every little piece ... has more weight [in short stories]. Someone who read the whole collection before it was published noticed that I had two stories with characters named Anne and David. I had to change the names in one [of them]. It took forever; I almost had to give it up. In one story I referred to the main character as "the woman," which [a reader noted] is very distancing. Once I gave her a name, the whole story changed–it became very fluid and very close. I liked it better and I instantly knew her name. All of this is so intuitive. It's one of the reasons I think writing fiction and reading fiction is so amazing, to be in the interstices of the mind.
Q You are now working on a novel. Does this mean that you've given up short stories?
A Over the last 20 years I've started five novels, and [for] three of them I have several hundred pages. I'm always aware of the form as well as the characters and what happens to them. Flannery O'Connor said that the traditional length of the short story is 20 pages and that something must happen on page five. That so often happens, that is true. There is something to this about structure. I have yet to figure out the novel and the way to write a long piece without feeling that I've got to end. When you write the first sentence of a short story, you start thinking about the end. But that's not true for a novel.... [H]ere the challenge is to make the action happen through character. You have to have a character that really interests you, and I'm working really hard to do that.
I haven't written [a short story] in a while because writing the novel is all-consuming. I will get back; I love short stories. But I would like to finish the novel first. #