Browse through Kate's thoughts on writing...
In an essay-review in the current GEORGIA REVIEW (winter 2007, vol LXI, no.4), Kathleen Snodgrass writes:
"Although these beautifully crafted stories ... are not linked or looped by recurring characters or settings, an overarching theme draws them together ... Steeliness and grit arise from Blackwell's skill at ferreting out what her characters would just as soon not remember of how they really feel about home and family life ... As Blackwell demonstrates in these wonderfully satisfying stories, moving on---moving away from home---doesn't come easily, if at all."
Excerpt from Kate's Pubspeak with the Washington Independent Writers, July 17, 2007:
Perhaps the biggest difference between fiction and nonfiction writers is that nonfiction writers already have something to say when they begin. Fiction writers don’t. The most we have is a question. We write in order to discover something.
Writing a story always takes longer than we expect. The modern short story is demanding; it depends on subtlety of language and structural patterns at least as much as it does on character and situation. Unlike the novel, the ending of a story is crucial, not because it resolves the narrative events (frequently it doesn’t), but because it reveals what the story means.
Excerpt from Kate's interview with Krista Walton from Washington City Paper, August 1, 2007:
“Family is a huge theme in Southern literature,” Blackwell says, and she had a large Southern family of her own to draw from. But it was a difficult decision to write about private details derived from her relatives, even if, in fictional form, the experience might be less recognizable. For one story, Blackwell called up the memory of the sudden death of her cousin’s husband. When the collection was about to be published, Blackwell wrote her cousin a letter telling her the story was based on her. “She wrote back a very generous, wonderful letter. She said, ‘Well, don’t all writers do that?’ But it was something I had to think long and hard about.”
Excerpt from Kate's interview with the DC Examiner, July 21, 2007:
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.
Excerpt from Kate's post on the Happy Booker blog, July 10, 2007:
Tomorrow I'm driving South on I-95, a road I've virtually memorized
over the years, heading down to see my family in North Carolina. This
time is different. Tomorrow night, in Raleigh, I'll be giving a
reading from my new story collection, my first book of fiction. A good
part of the audience will be related to me: fifteen or twenty cousins
live in the area. We're a close clan and there's a party afterward, so
I imagine most of them will show. These are people who've known me all
my life—or all theirs—and will recognize the stories' topography. Some
will recognize themselves, or think they do. They will surely get a
good look at me.