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INTERVIEW WITH KELLY LINK
Kathleen Rooney
In the story “Lull” from Kelly Link's second collection, Magic for Beginners, a game of Spin the Bottle winds up with a cheerleader sitting in a closet accompanied by the devil and a flashlight with two dead batteries. “Tell me a story,” says the devil. “Tell me a scary story….A funny, scary, sad, happy, story. I want everything.”
“You can't have everything,” says the cheerleader.
But if you read Kelly Link, you can.
In her stories, she floats the idea that all blonde women might actually be aliens, that cats can talk, and that certain TV shows can roam channels and air-times of their own free will. Kelly and her husband also run Small Beer Press and edit the zine Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. In this email interview, conducted in early 2006, she discusses zombie contingency plans, love at first smell, rose martinis, and the perils and payoffs of publishing yourself.
KR: Of what does a typical day in the life of Kelly Link consist?
KL: At the moment, and for the next few months, I’m teaching at Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, North Carolina. I teach Monday through Friday, and so my schedule has altered radically. And yet, I still spend most of my time reading. I'm rereading a series of young adult novels and short stories and novels that my composition class on Monday-Wednesday-Friday is reading -- books like M. T. Anderson’s Thirsty and Lynda Barry’s Cruddy, Margo Lanagan’s story “Singing My Sister Down,” Harriet the Spy, and Jane Hamilton’s Disobedience, etc. I’m reading manuscripts for the fiction workshop that’s meeting on Tuesday and Thursday. I prepare for class in the morning, and in the afternoon I walk over to a cafe in the downtown and try to get some writing done. Then I come home again and read for the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, which my partner Gavin Grant and I co-edit (the fantasy half—Ellen Datlow edits the horror half). Then we watch Veronica Mars on DVD. Or read something which is not work-related in any way.
That sounds fairly boring, doesn't it? I am a creature of routine. The only atypical thing about the next few months is that I’m staying put, more or less. Usually I go on 5 or 6 long-distance car trips every year. When we’re in Massachusetts, we drive down to New York at least once a month for a reading series that Gavin cohosts. And I would usually be walking or biking into town a few times a week to meet up with the writer Holly Black at Haymarket, a coffeehouse. I like working at the same table with other writers.
KR: How did you become a writer? Was it something you always knew you wanted to pursue? Did it run in your family? Where did your creativity have its genesis?
KL: I'm not particularly good at anything that doesn’t involve books. When I was a kid, I took piano lessons, tennis lessons, and watercolor lessons. I loved watercolors. I was okay at tennis. I never learned how to read sheet music, even though I took piano for eight years from at least three different teachers. Nothing felt particularly easy, including writing. I think I stuck with it because I spent so much time reading.
KR: If you weren’t a writer and editor, what would you be? And what are you in addition to a writer and editor?
KL: I would work in bookstores. Or a library. Or I would teach. Other versions of me: I'm a geologist, a veterinarian, a killer at ping pong or bridge. Or I work for a toy company. As for what I really am: I teach, sometimes. I'm happily married. I can't knit. I hate to fly. I love driving cross country. I spend most of my time reading.
KR: Where is home now?
KL: At the moment, Hickory, North Carolina. Which, coincidentally, is where my grandmother was born and grew up. Usually I live in Northampton, Massachusetts.
KR: In what may be my favorite story in Magic For Beginners, the title story, the protagonist’s father is a writer with a number of idiosyncrasies, including recreational shoplifting. Are writers more eccentric than quote-unquote normal people, or are their eccentricities simply better documented and mythologized? Do you have any interesting ones?
KL: As far as I can tell, everyone is eccentric. If the most noticeable of your personal eccentricities match up with the eccentricities of your larger social group or society, of course, you may never realize that you’re eccentric at all. But I will notice!
The detail about the recreational shoplifting is based on something a bookstore clerk once told me when we noticed the piles and piles of signed books by a local author/illustrator. She seemed a little bitter about the whole thing.
I was probably much more eccentric as a kid than I am now. In some ways. There were kinds of food that I wouldn't eat. I wouldn't read books that were told by first-person narrators. I liked to wear the
same clothes over and over again. (Actually, I still do that. I just wash them more frequently.)
KR: How did you come by your interest in ghosts, fairies, fairytales, and myths?
KL: From being read to, and from reading. I liked fairy tales, M. R. James, Angela Carter, Joan Aiken, Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter of Mars series, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Caddie Woodlawn, Black Beauty, E. Nesbit, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Ursula K. Le Guin, Saki, Diana Wynne Jones, H. P. Lovecraft and even books that weren't particularly good, like The Amityville Horror. I can’t tell you why the ghosts and fairy tales and mythological stories stuck harder. They just did. My taste as a reader hasn’t changed a great deal since I was a kid.
KR: What is your favorite ghost story? Fairytale? Urban legend? I’m sure you must get asked variations on this questions all the time, but what is it about these types of stories that makes them so gripping to read and write?
KL: One of my favorite ghost stories is “The Red Lodge” by H. Russell Wakefield. I'm also very fond of Joan Aiken’s ghost stories. I love “The Poacher”—Ursula K. Le Guin’s reworking of “Sleeping Beauty.”
And I don't think I've come across any good new urban legends recently—how disappointing!
KR: Your stories showcase your real knack for names. Why do you write about them so frequently, especially under circumstances where the names have been forgotten or keep changing, as in “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose” and “Some Zombie Contingency Plans”?
KL: Good question. I don't spend a great deal of time describing what my characters look like. They don’t spend a lot of time looking in mirrors, either. Perhaps I give them multiple names to compensate. Names tell you something about identity, particularly in fiction. I like to muddy waters: identity is a shifty, flexible thing.
KR: Your husband and press partner Gavin’s last name is Grant and yours is (obviously) Link—why did you decide to keep your name? Also, as you travel around to various places such as the MacDowell Colony and various teaching jobs, does he come with you?
KL: Lots of reasons. I'm a feminist. So is he. I like my name. So does he. I'd already been publishing under my own name, and so had he. It never occurred to either of us to change our names.
Our work is fairly portable—we’re both in North Carolina at the moment, while I’m teaching. But of course when you go to a writing colony you can’t bring your spouse along with you, unless you both apply as individuals and then, of course, you have to hope that both of you are accepted for residency.
We spend more time together than most couples get to spend, and then we spend days or weeks apart when one of us is traveling or teaching. It's tougher on the one who has to stay at home, but what can you do? And our home is pretty homey. Lots of books, comfortable sofas, a bike path just down the street, good friends who live nearby.
KL: How was the MacDowell Colony? What was it like?
The MacDowell Colony was heaven. They serve you the most wonderful breakfasts. Every day around noon, lunch was delivered in a basket to my door. The studios are cosy, private, and I had a baby grand piano in mine—that was daunting. I took piano for eight years and never managed to learn to read notes. I spent a whole month working on one ridiculously long story, but I also caught up on reading, fed my
addiction to ping pong and personality tests, performed a group experiment in ear candle technology, met visual artists, composers, animators, poets. We threw several dance parties, and we also played a week-long game of Killer. We watched The Lost Skeleton of Kadavra, an amazingly and intentionally bad movie!
I had a 30-minute walk out to my studio every day, through the woods, and frequently through the snow. At night the snow was so bright that you didn’t really need a flashlight to find your way back again.
KR: Have you ever used a pseudonym, either for your writing or for other purposes? Would you?
KL: I haven’t, but I hope to. There are a lot of variations on Kelly Link that I'd like to write under: Lolly Kink would be a good one for writing a romance novel. We published my collections under the Small
Beer imprint, Jelly Ink.
KR: And speaking of great names, your zine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, has one as well—how did you decide to call it that?
KL: Gavin came up with that one. Winston Churchill's mother had a tattoo on her wrist—it was either a rosebud wristlet or a snake. She was a Bright Young Thing. We’ve seen references to both, but we’ve never seen a picture of it.
KR: Relatedly, Small Beer is a catchy name for a press. How did it get named and how did the press get started?
KL: Again, Gavin came up with the name. Gavin is British. Small Beer is British slang for small business. (Like small potatoes.) Small beer was what brewers didn't sell—either because it was the good stuff that
they were keeping for themselves, or because it was the end of the batch and was weak or bitter or both.
We started the zine Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet ten years ago, and then went on to publish two chapbooks. We still publish the zine, the chapbooks, and now we publish at least two books a year as well. We started with two goals: to publish books that we loved, and to at least break even when we published them. (The traditional joke is: how do you make a little money in publishing. The answer: Start with a lot of money.)
We’ve published several short story collections, but we've also published a translation, a debut novel, and republished several favorite books which had been languishing out-of-print. I’d love to have enough funds to bring more books back into print. But since Gavin and I do most of the work—from layout to cover design to jacket copy to marketing, we have to choose our projects carefully.
KR: Do you have any advice for aspiring indie press starters? And what is the role of the small press today?
KL: Well, you could always start here: http://www.speculativeliterature.org/Editing/ — the Speculative
Literature Foundation's index page for small presses. There is a real wealth of online resources and listservs for newbie publishers that you can find with a little judicious googling. Get your friends involved. Publish books that you love. Make sure they look good—and I don't mean just the cover art. Make sure the page looks good, too. Don't cut corners by doing your own proofreading. Try publishing a zine or chapbooks first, if you don't have much experience in design or editing or marketing.
The role of a small press publisher is to publish work that you're passionate about. To publish it and market it as well as you can. And since you’re not going to get rich doing it, make sure that you have fun doing it.
KR: You are clearly a success story when it comes to your decision to have your press publish your collection. Yet there seems to be quite a stigma about self-publishing—why is that, and how did you manage to avoid it?
KL: Publishing yourself isn’t necessarily a bad idea as long as you have extremely low expectations. But you ought to exhaust most of your other options first. Ask yourself what you want to accomplish. Do you just want to see what your words look like in print? There are non-vanity, print-on-demand publishers like lulu.com -- and there are also websites like Preditors and Editors (http://www.anotherealm.com/prededitors) that will steer you clear of scams, rip-off artists, bad agents, and
nightmare contracts with unscrupulous publishing companies.
Usually a writer gets to publish a short story collection once they’ve published a novel or two (or sometimes, in order to get a novel out of a promising writer, a publishing house will offer them a two-book deal—a collection to be followed by a novel). Most publishing companies don't expect to do very well with collections, although there are plenty of exceptions: Lorrie Moore, Junot Diaz, Nathan Englander,
Jhumpa Lahiri, Melissa Banks, etc.
By self-publishing I figured I was inviting ridicule and scorn. But we hoped that there would also be an audience who enjoyed the stories. I’d already published all but two of the stories in genre and literary
magazines, and several writers had made it clear that they were willing to provide enthusiastic blurbs. We had friends who worked in publishing who offered to answer our questions, and steer us clear of the worst
mistakes we might make. Our goal was to make Stranger Things Happen look as much as possible like all the other books on the shelf at the bookstore (hoping, of course, that it would make it onto the shelves of
at least some bookstores). We found a fulfillment house who could get our books into Ingram’s warehouses. And we published, at the same time, Meet Me at the Moon Room, a collection by one of my favorite short-story writers, Ray Vukcevich. We figured that even if we were making a mistake by publishing my book, at least we could do right by Ray.
My agent sent out my second collection last year, and when we looked at the offers that we got, it seemed as if Gavin and I were better equipped to get the book out. We had all the sales numbers, etc, from Stranger Things Happen. We had a rough idea of how well Magic for Beginners ought to do. We didn't want someone else to take on the new collection unless they could print more, sell more, get the book out to
a larger audience, do more interesting things with promotion, etc, than we could. My agent said it was unusual, to say the least, but that we ought to do it ourselves.
And once the book came out, Tina Pohlman at Harcourt bought paperback rights. A happy ending! But I have to admit that it was great fun to publish the hardcover of Magic for Beginners. I'm a control freak. I
got to pick the paper weight. I asked Shelley Jackson for cover art again, as well as for interior illustrations. We designed a limited edition that comes with a deck of cards. How cool is that? (Or maybe: how dorky is that?)
KR: It’s super-cool! You’ve said that one of the reasons for the success of your debut, Stranger Things Happen, was that Laura Miller of salon.com told everyone in New York to read it. How important is it to be in, or at least be in some way connected with, NYC to be successful?
KL:I don't really know the answer to that. Laura Miller, as far as I can tell, didn't just tell everyone in New York to read Stranger Things Happen. She told everyone she knew, period. Independent bookstores like St. Mark's Bookshop and Shakespeare & Co. in New York, and Borderlands and Cody's in San Francisco, and Women and Children First in Chicago (and many, many others) have been extremely good to us. The
science-fiction buyer at Borders, Micha Hershman, was enthusiastic. He put the book into individual stores where he thought it would sell.
I don't know that you need to live in New York to be published. I know lots of writers who live in New York who ought to be successful who aren’t. But there are certainly opportunities for writers living in or
near New York—reading series, community, workshops, teaching opportunities, excellent bookstores, etc.
KR: Does Small Beer publish poetry? Why or why not?
KL: We publish poetry in our zine. We haven't published any chapbooks or collections of poetry, although there are two poets that I would like to approach. There are dozens of wonderful small presses that specialize in poetry. It hasn't been our niche so far.
KR: How does Small Beer decide which reprints to publish? Is it ever difficult to get the rights?
KL: We republish books that we love which have been out of print for a while. If it’s difficult to get rights to a particular book, then we tend to give up. We had too much other work to keep up with.
KR: There are several lovely zombie stories in your latest collection, Magic for Beginners, including “Some Zombie Contingency Plans” and “The Hortlak”. What got you into this zombie kick and why? What’s your favorite zombie movie? I’m fascinated by zombies myself—in fact, at the moment, they’re sort of my number one irrational fear. What is it about them that’s so compelling? What is YOUR best zombie contingency plan?
KL: Thank you! I've been obsessed with zombie movies and zombies in general for the last three years or so. I've been watching all the classic zombie movies—how to pick a favorite? I love them all: Sean of the Dead, and Night of the Living Dead, and both the old Dawn of the Dead and the remake, and Return of the Living Dead, and 28 Days Later. I'm not quite as fond of the Italian zombie movies, although there are some extremely compelling moments in Lucio Fulci’s Zombie. I'm fond of Night of the Comet. There’s a new German movie, Zombie Honeymoon, which I haven't seen yet, but I'm looking forward to. There’s an Andy Duncan short story, “Zora and the Zombie” up online at Scifiction, which I absolutely love. There's even a wind-up zombie board game.
Have you seen the knitted zombies up at Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/electricbiscuit/tags/dawnofthedead/show/
-- if only I knew how to knit! And didn't need to sleep!
My zombie contingency plan involves wearing lots of layers and winter jackets. Keep all that tasty skin covered up! Or one of those inflatable plastic globes that Jackie Chan uses to escape in at the beginning of Operation Condor (aka Armour of God). I would hole up in a library or make my way cross-country to Powell’s, and hole up there. Somewhere with books and coffee would be best. I would settle for the
traditional refuge: the suburban mall. Even though things will go badly for me at the end, at least I will have had the good, old, bittersweet, traditional, apocalyptic no-credit-card-needed shopping spree. After all, that’s what zombies are all about: apocalyptic luxury shopping. Brains on sale in aisle eight!
KR: The story “Magic for Beginners” seems clearly influenced by Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Do you have a favorite TV show? And have you ever considered writing for TV or the movies?
KL: I loved the first 5 seasons of Buffy, the 6th season intermittently, and about two episodes of the very last season. Futurama has always been entertaining. Project Runway is awesome, and so was Manor House. Iron Chef rules. The Office! At the moment I'm catching up with Veronica Mars and Gilmore Girls with Netflix. And if you have access to an all-region DVD player, you ought to check out two British shows: League of Gentlemen, and The Book Group.
I like the idea of working on a creative project as part of a team. That aspect of TV writing really appeals to me. But I would say that I've considered writing for TV or the movies in the same way that I've considered being a geologist, a veterinarian, or the long-lost heir to a minor country somewhere in Eastern Europe.
KR: You’ve said you’d like to write a YA novel at some point—why YA, and why not an adult one? Do you think that YA gets a bum rap in the hierarchy of literature (not that I¹m into that kind of thing—I’m just asking because at last year’s AWP Conference there was a panel called “Beyond Judy Blume” that discussed how women writers are frequently labeled YA whereas male writers producing similar work get to be The Next Great American Novelist or whatever)?
KL: I'd like to write novels, period. But I seem to have ideas for YA novels, and I also like the idea of writing towards a specific genre. I love reading young adult fiction. I feel as if I understand what makes the bones of a good YA novel. And my favorite readers are young adults (or adults who read as if they were still young adults.)
I don’t know about the bum rap thing—I don't have much patience for people who dismiss entire genres or categories of literature out of hand. And the idea of The Great American Novel has always seemed faintly ridiculous to me. It sounds like the kind of book that you’d end up using to squash roaches or prop up table legs on an uneven floor.
KR: Would you ever write a memoir? Do you, or have you ever, written poetry? And your stories are so visual—do you do any visual art?
KL: I wrote poetry when I was in high school. It was, in more ways than one, a requirement. And I took art classes (watercolor classes, especially) until I went to college. And I frequently sing in the car when I'm driving!
In the workshop that I'm teaching, everyone wrote down two nouns and we stuck them in a baseball cap. Everyone took two nouns out, and I asked them to write either a villanelle or a sestina using those two nouns as a starting place. Someone got “scrotum” and “pot”, which was tough luck. I got “infant” and “hand” and I'm going to attempt to write a sestina as well. Seems only fair.
KR: All of your stories are surprising in their originality, but do you ever worry that you’ll fall into the habit of writing a typical “Kelly Link Story” in which things seem normal at first, quickly get strange, and then lead to an unexpected if not entirely satisfying (by which I mean you leave lots of things mysterious, which I love) conclusion? How do you keep it new, both for yourself and for your readers?
KL: I don't think I'll ever want to write a story in which I explain everything. But I don’t want to write the same story over and over again, either. My favorite stories in the new collection are “Lull” and “The Hortlak” and “Catskin” because they’re not like each other. I have a story in the first issue of A Public Space I like a great deal because it started off as a conversation between two characters with no speech tags, no description, nothing but dialogue. After I felt like I knew the two characters, I went back and fleshed it out and reworked it until I was happy with it.
Every writer has particular, useful obsessions—which translate into characters or situations or kinds of narrative arcs—that they come back to again and again. But you have to find new ways to approach your obsessions. New angles. I get nervous when a story becomes easy to write because I've written that same kind of story in the past. In some ways, writing ought to get harder rather than easier. Once you’ve figured out a particular way to do something, you might want to abandon that technique.
KR: Speaking of leaving things mysterious, why do you do this with so many of your stories? This makes me think of the story of how during the filming of The Big Sleep, Humphrey Bogart and Howard Hawks had a disagreement over who kills the chauffeur, but when they called up Raymond Chandler, he said that he didn¹t know. Do you know the answers to your own mysteries?
KL: I like mysteries better than solutions. In fiction, at least, I like secrets and misunderstandings and complications and contradictions. I like narratives that can have several meanings all at once. I like misdirection. I like crossword puzzles better before someone has filled them in. I love when other writers don’t know the answers to questions about their own work. Sometimes not-knowing seems more believable and powerful than knowing.
KR: In another interview, you mention that you sometimes go for long walks to help yourself think. What is it about walking that’s so good for that kind of inspiration?
KL: Showers are good, too! On walks, I can't be distracted by work or reading or obligations. When I'm on my way to a coffeehouse where I'll be writing, a half hour walk is a sort of threshold state. I'm not working yet, but I'm thinking about what I'll be working on.
KR: And at the risk of trying to impose your own life too much on your work, how do you feel about bridge? It seems to show up in story after story, are you a big fan of the game? If so, why, and if not, why all the bridge references?
KL: I haven't played bridge in a few years—we moved on to German board games, which require less bidding strategy. And I wasn’t particularly good at it, either. What I loved was how you had to speak in a very specific code, which your opponents ought to understand exactly as well as your partner could understand it. And when someone had the lead but might not have a particularly strong hand, it was so much fun to try to figure out their strategy of play. We called this the Stupid Trick—hoping that the other players would stupidly get rid of the cards they would need towards the end of the game in order to win.
I'm finding this a hard question to answer in an intelligent way […] Pattern is a way of understanding art—as a writer, I like referring to other kinds of patterns.
KR: Why are some people so into labels? Like wanting to label things fantasy, or sci fi or literary? What do you make of these categories and how do you deal with/avoid being put into them, especially insofar as you¹ve been in Conjunctions and McSweeney’s, but have also won Nebula and World Fantasy awards?
KL: Labels aren't nearly as useful as, say, Venn diagrams. Wouldn't it be great if bookstores could arrange their stock in a sort of enormous, elaborate, interlocking system of Venn diagrams? (As a former bookstore clerk, however, I must now stop to think about restocking books & reshelving books, and I take back everything I just said.)
I've been lucky, partly because it's easier to find things out-of-category using the Internet. Instead of relying on category, you might rely on the recommendations of a litblogger whose taste matches up to yours. Or you might read something online about a book you really loved which mentions three other books. So you go looking for information about those books. For example, Anne McCaffrey and Jo Walton have both written books about dragons. But if you loved Anne McCaffrey, I might not recommend Jo Walton’s Tooth and Claw just because they’re both fantasy. But if you love Trollope or Austen, I'd strongly recommend Tooth and Claw. And if you love Patrick O’Brien’s books, I’d recommend Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon. If you like George Saunders’ short stories, you might like Margo Lanagan. If you like Michael Chabon’s short stories, you might like a collection by a writer named Joe Hill.
I don't particularly care what category I go into—if I'm asked, I say that I write science fiction. If you then say that you love science fiction, I explain that I don't really write science fiction because there's no science in it. Actually I write about zombies—but that's because I enjoy seeing my books get shelved under different categories.
KR: Where have you taught? Do you like teaching writing, and why? You got your own MFA at UNC Greensboro, but what do you think of the oft-maligned workshop system and of MFA programs?
KL: I've taught several times at Clarion East and once at Clarion West. These are intensive, six-week summer workshops that were designed around writers working in genre fiction. I love workshops, because I like talking about short fiction. I love being part of a group of working writers.
You don’t have to go through an MFA program or a workshop like Clarion to become a better writer, but I think most writers benefit from community, a concentrated period of time which is focused on reading other people’s work as well as producing their own work. It’s always useful to see how many ways an intelligent group of motivated readers can interpret one story.
Part of teaching is knowing when you shouldn't meddle with someone else's work. Part of becoming a better writer is knowing when you ought to ignore someone else’s well-intentioned, intelligent advice. But when someone in workshop says something that doesn't seem useful to you (or something that seems entirely wrongheaded) it’s still useful to figure out why that particular piece of feedback seems unusable or wrongheaded. If you're really lucky, in a workshop of 15 people, you'll find two or three who have something valuable to say to your work. (And they won’t always be the same people each time.)
Good workshops encourage writers to become more like themselves. To sound more like themselves. A lot of the time, the rough places in someone’s stories are the place that they ought to be working towards. A good workshop will allow writers the necessary space to make interesting and useful mistakes. Bad workshops establish a particular kind of voice or style, and correct writers who deviate from that style. But in the end, it’s really up to the writer what she gets out of a workshop, even a bad one.
KR: You are clearly super well-read and adore libraries and reading (I love how in “Magic for Beginners” the name of the mysterious TV show is “The Library.” And yet, if the statistics of the National Endowment for the Arts and other sources are to be trusted, you are in a serious minority in this respect. Why do so few people read, and is it something that writers should be worried about, or should we just not sweat it? Also, the current president, though married to an erstwhile librarian, is a notorious and proud non-reader. What, if any, are the political ramifications of living in a not-so-literate democracy?
KL: I will always be tempted to vote for the candidate who seems to have read the most books. (And not just nonfiction! I'm looking for a presidential candidate who reads fiction, too!)
I don't think readers have ever been a majority. I don't know what the ramifications are. I do worry, but in general, this is low on my priority list of things to worry about. It’s a long, long list.
KR: I suspect that you must get asked about your favorite books all the time. But how about this: as a former bookseller, could you give me your Top Five Staff Recs of all time?
KL: My Top Five Staff Recs of All Time is different from my Top Five Favorite Books ever. And it varies, depending on who is asking me. And on when they ask me. But here are Five Recs That I'm Reasonably Comfortable Making When Someone I Don't Know Asks Me For Five Books They Could Take Along On A Vacation When They Might Survive a Plane Crash and Be Stuck on a Mysterious Island for A Lengthy Period of Time (and no, I don't really enjoy Lost):
The Once and Future King by T. H. White
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
Cobweb by Stephen Bury
Archer's Goon by Diana Wynne Jones
King Hereafter by Dorothy Dunnett
The Decameron by Boccaccio
The Man Who Ate Everything by Jeffrey Steingarten
Collected Stories by Saki
Burning Your Boats by Angela Carter
The Rattle Bag, edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes
(Note that I couldn't stick to 5 books. Your luggage will be heavier, but you'll thank me when you’re trapped on that island. And that list would be entirely different, by the way, if I were making it in about an hour.)
KR: In “Flying Lessons” and elsewhere, you are especially gifted at smell imagery. In “The Faery Handbag” for instance, the narrator observes “Jake’s hair smelled like iced tea with honey in it, after all the ice has melted.” How do you do that? And why do you write so much about smells?
KL: Thank you! Isn’t smell supposed to be strongly connected to how we remember things? I'm much more convinced, also, by love at first smell than by love at first sight. It's all about the pheromones.
KR: Also in “Flying Lessons,” you give a particularly nice description of the moon: “the moon was sharp and thin as if someone had eaten the juicy bit and left the rind.” What is it about the moon? Why is it so poetic? So frequently written about?
KL: Well, for one thing, moon is a great word. Moon, moon, moon. It's a little bit silly-sounding, but also very beautiful. Sun isn’t nearly such a good word.
KR: For some reason, I seem to have gotten into the habit of asking my interviewees about cooking—do you cook? Could you share a favorite recipe with the readers of Redivider?
KL: Oatmeal Cookies (This is an old family recipe.)
5 packed cups of old fashioned oatmeal (not instant)
1 pound of light brown sugar (one box=1 pound=2 cups)
2/3 cup of canola oil
3 large eggs
2 teaspoons salt
4 teaspoons vanilla
Mix dry ingredients, add oil and stir well. Refrigerate this mixture for 8 hours or longer (not sure if this is really necessary but I always do it). Mix together the 3 well-beaten eggs, 2 teaspoons of salt, and 4 teaspoons of vanilla. Combine two mixtures and then drop by spoonfuls onto cookie sheet covered with aluminum foil (best to use new Reynolds Easy Release - otherwise you usually have to freeze the cookies to get them off the aluminum foil). Bake for at least 10 minutes in 350 degree oven. Take out when the edges of the cookies are well browned. Cool (or freeze) completely before removing from aluminum foil.
If you are fond of oatmeal, on page 100 of the MOOSEWOOD RESTAURANT BOOK OF DESSERTS, there is a fabulous recipe for Irish Oatmeal Cake. It's nutty, dense, moist, and the butterscotch icing is worth the trouble.
Rose Martini (The writer Holly Black served these at a New Year's party. I loved them. Moreover, I had no hangover the next day. Coincidence? Probably.)
Holly says that you make this martini by adding 3 parts champagne to 1 part vodka and then increase until they are about half and half over the course of the evening. Shakers is the brand that makes rose-infused vodka.
And lastly, when I was a kid, my favorite meal involved my mother taking a hotdog, slicing it down the middle lengthwise, inserting a long, skinny wedge of cheddar cheese, and then wrapping the doctored hotdog, centered, in a triangle of dough from one of those refrigerated cardboard tubes of crescent rolls. Then baking it according to crescent-roll instructions.
KR: Is there anything about which I haven't asked you that you would like to mention?
KL: Nope! Thank you, so much!
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