The Woman Is OK at The End: An Interview with Gwen Kirby
Shit Cassandra Saw, Gwen E. Kirby’s electrifying debut collection of short stories, storms the Bastille of Badly Written Women, setting free Cassandra, Boudicca, and other heroines both historical and modern. Kirby teaches creative writing at the University of the South and her stories have appeared in Tin House, One Story, and a host of other literary magazines. We sat down over Zoom on a Wednesday in April to discuss her stories, writing process, and favorite books.
Karla Evans: In your story, “A Few Normal Things that Happen a Lot” there is a woman who is so focused on having to guard herself from predatory men that she misses a twenty-dollar bill lying on the ground, which is then picked up by a man with nothing to fear. You have said that this story was inspired by the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court Hearings. Were you angrier at the way Kavanaugh behaved during the hearings and didn’t even seem to remember attacking Christine Blasey-Ford, or were you more angry at the way Blasey-Ford’s trauma was dismissed by so many conducting the hearings?
Gwen Kirby: Oh god I mean both, both so much. I felt two different types of anger and pain watching those hearings. I mean, watching her strength and dignity, having to hold it together in front of people who were doubting her and gaslighting her . . . I won’t speak for every woman, but for a lot of women watching it, that experience felt almost too familiar. I hated seeing her have to relive that trauma. I hated that she’d done something so brave by coming forward to talk about it, only to have it ruin her life a second time, and I was truly angry and horrified to see how entitled Kavanaugh felt to the position on the court. He seemed insulted that he would even be asked about such a thing. Who could remember it, how was it important, oh he’d been a teenager and it hadn’t happened anyway; I was appalled. She carried herself with such strength and dignity and he did not, yet her life was destroyed a second time and he sits on the highest court in the land. It’s rare for a moment to distill so many of the things that we feel in the world around us, but that moment did this for me very, very strongly.
KE: Was that the first time you had used writing as a psychological release?
GK: I think writing is always a form of psychological release in that, when a story is good, you find yourself tapping into something you didn’t realize you needed to work through or realize you needed to find a way to say. “Shit Cassandra Saw That She Didn’t Tell the Trojans Because at That Point Fuck Them Anyway” was the first story I wrote after the election of Donald Trump. I didn’t know what to do with everything I was feeling, and the story was like ripping off a Band-Aid. Some of the other stories have been taken more directly from moments of my life. For instance, the last story in the collection, “We Handle It,” is about a group of girls at summer camp who are being harassed and stalked by this middle-aged man. I had witnessed something like that as a dorm counselor the prior summer, though it did not escalate to the degree that it does in the story. Watching teenaged girls feel themselves under the eye of a predator, feel themselves under threat, brought up so many memories for me from my own girlhood that it became a story I needed to figure out how to tell. In a lot of my stories—and I didn’t really realize this until I wrote the whole book—I feel like I’m trying to give corrective endings. In “We Handle It” the girls imagine stabbing the guy to death, in “A Few Normal Things That Happen A Lot” you know all the women are going to be fine. Literally the structure of the story is that the woman is ok at the end of every single paragraph.
ME: I’m glad you mentioned knowing the women would be okay, because I don’t know that I could have read “The Disneyland of Mexico” [a story in the book where an exchange student spends her time sneaking around with older teens] if I felt that the character was going to be abused just to be sensational.
GK: It’s an interesting balance that comes from what one’s strengths are and who one is as a writer. I have certainly read books where the characters are very much not okay, and I respect that. That is territory that they tackle. Trauma can be hard to write about and I appreciate reading those stories, but I do not find myself wanting to write those stories and so in my book I’m tackling a lot of the same subjects but in a slightly different way.
KE: In most of your stories, women are looking towards the future and what they’re going to do next. Did it feel good to write stories where the future was open to the characters instead of picking the path they would take?
GK: The short story form fits to my desire to have the difficult things these women are going through mesh with the idea of possibility and the future. There’s a nice way in which the form of the short story kind of fits to my feeling of wanting to have the difficult things these women are going through mesh with the idea of possibility and the future. Short stories don’t really provide answers or even endings. At most, they provide us with pauses. I liked that for those women; those moments of openness and hope reflect, too, the way that I’ve always felt about the future. I’m an incurable optimist, but the last two years have truly tested my ability to be that way. I think there’s something hopeful about looking to the future. But also, it’s a melancholy aspect of the book in that you know the contemporary women are having to look to the future for hope in the same way that Cassandra or Boudicca or all of these women in the past did.
KE: How did you compile the shit Cassandra saw for the opening story?
GK: That was not a story that I imagined would be in the book, and when I was first writing it, from what I remember of it. It was an exercise in joy to think: what do I love about the world? Jell-O! T-shirts! and then to complicate it so that it’s a story and not just an exercise. I think I had this idea that if I were a serious writer, my book would have seven stories in it, like Jhumpa Lahiri’s. There would be seven stories and they would all be ten thousand words long, which is just not the way I write. When I published “Shit Cassandra Saw” online a few months later, I was stunned by the reaction to it. The story seemed to speak to people, and so I started what I thought was a second project, writing flash fiction stories about women from the past. Then I thought, Why should this be separate? The themes are the same, and I want this feeling of cohesion between women now and women in the past.
I think we’re often denied a sense of kinship with women in the past because the only ones we know about are there because they gave birth to an important man, or they were married to an important man or maybe sewed a flag. It can be hard to feel they were just like us. No shade on men, I’m married to one, but I have lots of other valuable qualities besides just being attached to a man. And I wanted the feeling in my book that these women from the past had so much in common with us. I love historical fiction, and this became a way to indulge that love while creating the spine of the book; all of the historical stories are in chronological order.
KE: Do you see the fiction that you write and fiction such as the TV show “The Great,” which is about Catherine the Great but with a decent husband, as pointing towards a trend where people say, “What if?” about historical women instead of just looking at what happened to them?
GK: That’s one of the reasons I started having the confidence to write historical fiction and put my own spin on it. The story about Boudicca is about her imagining what major league baseball team she would like to play for—it’s very much not concerned with historical accuracy. My confidence and excitement about writing this way comes in part from my love of romance novels. I love getting to the end of a historical romance and seeing a note from the author that says the heroine was based on a specific woman. As in the case of Tessa Dare’s book, A Week to be Wicked, based on a specific woman who was a scientist in the 1800s. These reimaginings of women’s lives are currently focused on the women who were scientists, and artists, and radicals. They are making shit up, but they’re basing the shit on very real women, and it’s wonderful to bring these women forward as fully-fledged people who are more than just a stereotype of oppression. I don’t think that was the way they lived their lives.
KE: And I am sure that given the chance, Boudicca would have rather played baseball. Than—
GK: Oh yeah, I mean—
KE: —be slaughtered.
GK: Yeah [laughs].
KE: Are there more historical women that you would like to write about?
GK: Two particularly stand out in my mind. I read the biography “Romantic Outlaws” about Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter, Mary Godwin, who became Mary Shelley. I knew Mary Wollstonecraft was a badass, but I had no idea of the radical, incredible life that woman lived. I’m also interested in the Restoration-era playwright Aphra Bhen, who was the first woman to make a living from writing in the English language. She was also a spy for the crown and just lived a fascinating life. I have a fricking PhD in literature, and yet I discover new people all the time, and in a lot of cases it’s because they’re women and they were dropped out of the canon or are only being pulled back in now.
KE: History told through the life of a man is often war and government, but with women it’s survival. Even with women married to kings, there’s a sense of living by their wits that you don’t always get with the history of a man.
GK: I think that speaks to our tendency as a society to use the word “domestic” as a slur. When you talk about novels that a woman has written, critics often say, “Oh, that’s a domestic novel.” Domesticity is at the heart of everyone’s lived experience, and the idea that they were just being women, just running the whole house, and bearing and raising the children, and doing everything, that that is less important, or less interesting, or less worthy of study, is obviously not how I think.
KE: Right, and if they are finding a way to express themselves, that’s considered crafts instead of arts.
GK: Oh, yeah exactly.
ME: Your stories take several forms in the book. Did you decide on the form first, or did you have an idea and then find a form that fit?
GK: Some stories start as kind of a fun experiment, and with others I’ll know what the heart of the story is. It takes a lot of different tries to figure out how I want the story to be structured, whether it needs a weird form or a more traditional narrative. For “How to Tile Your Bathroom in Six Easy Steps,” I knew that I wanted to write a story about a woman who was doing an angry bathroom remodel. I wasn’t planning to do it as a list, but I, like the woman in the story, had never retiled a bathroom. I had to go online to do research about how to retile a bathroom, and I was reading through the Wikihelp article, and I thought, “I bet I could structure the story this way and that would be really good,” because it’s a very internal story. It’s not a story in which a lot happens, it’s just a woman retiling her bathroom. The story is internal, and the list format makes it seem like it has action and structure because it goes from step to step to step. For other stories, I set myself projects. “Friday Night” is all one sentence because I thought it would be cool to write a story that was all one sentence. “Jerry’s Crab Shack” is in the form of a Yelp review because I had a shellfish allergy and was sad I couldn’t go to this crab shack, and so I wrote a Yelp review from someone who went to a crab shack but couldn’t eat the crab.
KE: Do you have a novel you’re working on or thinking of working on?
GK: I am interested in writing a novel about Aphra Behn, and I am working on a contemporary novel that is set during a running festival and gets very weird from there. I’ve never written a novel before, and while the skills from short story writing certainly help, it is a new experience.
KE: Do you write poetry?
GK: I do; I wrote a ton of poetry in high school and college, but it became clear that the thing I loved most as a reader was fiction. I realized that I was writing poetry because I was too scared to write fiction. After I let the floodgates open on the fiction front, I kept writing poetry but only for myself and my notebook, not for the world.
KE: One of the reasons your stories read so fast, I think, is because there’s so much precision in the word choice. Like, you can get the feeling in a few words that I think for other people it might take a couple of sentences, and that’s why I thought, “I wondered if that came from poetry?”
GK: I love poetry, and I have been fortunate to have a chance to study poetry through undergrad and grad school. I am in awe of those poets where it’s two stanzas, but it will walk with you through your life and mean something different ten years ago than it will ten years from now. That’s down to how much they thought of those images and those specific words. I am in awe of poets and I love poetry.
KE: Is there a story that you wish you had written or an author you wish you could emulate?
GK: Oh! Not that I wish I had written, but there are definitely writers who I look at and I think, “That is a talent with the craft of writing that I aspire to.” George Saunders is so playful and funny and heartbreaking; his writing is so light on the page that it dances. It reads quickly because it feels like you’re talking with him, but the language is so beautiful; I wish I were as good a writer as George Saunders. I’m in awe of writers like N.K. Jemisin who build big worlds in Sci-Fi and fantasy. That’s not the kind of imagination that I have, and so I’m so grateful to writers who can build those huge, beautiful spectacles.
KE: I am also envious of world-building writers, and I have noticed this more with men writing, that it seems they are able to take time out of the plot and tell an unrelated incident. They have the space to pause and really draw you in.
GK: Yeah, I do too. I think that you do bring up a good point about a gender disparity there. The most iconic and telling contrast between works of male genius and works of female genius, to me, would be James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway.” They’re both the story of one day in the character’s head but one is a bazillion pages long and one is a slender little novel. I think that men are given the space to write novels of ideas in a way that women have not been, traditionally. I think there’s an acceptance of messiness in the male genius that there is not in the female genius. I have to say, I’d rather read Mrs. Dalloway twenty more times than read Ulysses once. I also think there is something to be said for editors who say, “Look sir, we do not need this description of you going to the bathroom, we are good, let’s stick to the point.” I think there is a real gender disparity there and I don’t have a sense of how much that is changing now or if it is.
KE: Yeah, it’s hard to say. I know Lucille Clifton wrote short poems because that’s what she had time for and Virginia Woolf had a household to run.
GK: Men are given the benefit of the doubt. I love Moby Dick because it’s a beautiful novel but also a real hot mess. It’s expansive, and strange, and digressive, and I think there is a cult built around male genius that says, “It can’t be contained,” and “It’s too big for editing.” I can’t think of a book by a woman that has that. I’m sure there is one, gentle reader; I’m sure it exists, but a lot of examples of books by men that fit the description pop to mind and no examples of books by women do. No shame on Melville, I love Melville. And I really love Moby Dick.
ME: When you don’t have anything on your reading list, where do you go for suggestions?
GK: Oh, that’s a good question. Depends on what I’m in the mood to read. If I’m looking for literary fiction, I go to my friends. I am really lucky to have friends who are writers and readers and know me well, and who will suggest something they know I would like rather than just something they enjoyed. If I’m in the mood for a romance, the blog Smart Bitches, Trashy Books has incredible reviews of romance novels. And I love finding a book by walking through a bookstore, and picking up books, and smelling them, and looking at the covers, and opening them up to read a couple of pages. There’s something really exciting about buying a book at a bookstore—not because you’re on Amazon reading a million reviews about it, but just because the premise looks exciting and the cover is beautiful. it’s like choosing someone for a date.
KE: What was the last dark-horse book that you read?
GK: I read this book a little bit ago called Vacuum in the Dark [Jen Beagin], which I had never heard of but ended up loving. It’s everything that I should not like because it barely has a plot but I was absolutely hooked. And I just read Katherine Heiny’s collection, Single, Carefree, Mellow. I had never heard of her and I was blown away. She is a writer who does what I would like to be able to do well, which is tell stories that are important and deeply empathetic but also profoundly hopeful; finding her was like finding a friend. And I just read “Vladimir” [Julia May Jonas] which was an absolute trip. So if anyone wants to just go on a journey, that book was very bold, and I salute the author.
KE: How many books do you read a week?
GK: I read around 100 to 120 books a year. So whatever the math on that goes down to. I read a lot, two or three books a week? And, of course, it depends. You know, you pick up a big honker of a book, that’s going to take a while longer. I usually have a few books going at once, and I have found during the pandemic that it’s been a huge source of escape and joy to be in those books, reading about other lives and imagining that I’m not stuck here where things are hard.
KE: If there is a Gwen Kirby in 100 years, who do you think she will be writing about?
GK: (exasperated sigh) Well I guess it would depend on the kind of story she wanted to tell. I think if it’s me trying to write about it, a hundred years from now, I imagine it will be about a woman who got so annoyed with her husband that she accidently turned him into a raccoon or something. I’m sure another writer will write a searing and beautiful novel about what it was like to be a doctor during this time; I think there will be as many human experiences and as many options as there are for any time. The question I’ve been asking myself that I don’t have an answer to is: is this ever going to be a time that I will write about, and what would that look like?
KE: Right.
GK: We have so much literature from World War I, so much literature from the Roaring Twenties, but very little literature about the great influenza that happened at the same time. People just didn’t want to fucking write about it. I’m not sure I’ll want to write about it either.
KE: The first time I heard about the flu epidemic was in the kid’s book Rascal. I had remembered it going on and on about people dropping dead at wells, but I looked at it again when this pandemic started and less than a paragraph is devoted to the flu.
GK: I started a book written during the bubonic plague during the pandemic, and it was a really wonderful book, but I couldn’t finish it; it was too much for the time. I can imagine a writer a hundred years from now doing something more interesting with it than I’ll ever be able to figure out how to do.
