Kate Folk on Pushing Past the Gimmick

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Kate Folk about her new novel, Sky Daddy.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: Your main character, Linda, has a very distinct voice, she’s in love and sexually attracted to planes and she really thinks of these planes as male. She thinks of them as have having personalities and even in the book, when she meets people, she compares their faces to different models of planes. And she’s saying humans, don’t do it for me, but these planes do. So, I’m curious about creating something that, on some level, feels very fantastical, and presenting this as truthful and full of feeling for your audience, and how, as a writer, there’s some great lessons for other writers and readers to understand about this, and I’m wondering if you have anything to share about that?

Kate Folk: Yeah, that was sort of the whole challenge of the book, and that was maybe what drew me to the project in the first place, was this idea of a character study and trying to really inhabit this character’s voice and being and see the world through her eyes, so that it didn’t feel like just a gimmick or something, or like I was on the outside, like making fun of her, or just, you know, doing the easy jokes. And it took, really, I think, just a lot of drafting in her voice, like I spent probably a whole year once I had found that Moby Dick inspiration of just writing 1000 words a day in the voice of Linda and not worrying at all about the story, or, not trying to make it coherent to any kind of plot yet, but just writing whatever I felt like that day in Linda’s voice, and putting her in all kinds of different situations, and seeing what she would do or just having her muse about planes, like the way in Moby Dick, there’s so much like musing about whales and cataloging of different types of whales and all of that. I think by doing that and spending so much time with the character, I felt like I really knew her so well by the time I went back and wrote the story, as what the story ended up as which is more of like a plot driven story. So, I think that’s really necessary, because it is like all of that work is under the surface of what ended up in the final cut, and it gives the story a sense of authority, I think, because it isn’t like Linda is this surface level caricature, she is this more embodied character that I’ve done so much thinking about and there’s the little details like that. Like, you know, it’s just the men that she encounters in the world who she compares to planes, because planes are male, and I think that’s like, there’s kind of a funny gender commentary, and also some commentary about masculinity and how ridiculous these gender expectations can be, right? But that she sort of applies them to men, but also to planes, and thinking of a plane is the ultimate masculine symbol, because it’s so strong and powerful and potentially violent and takes her in its aluminum arms and rushes her across the continent. So, things like that were really fun for me to imagine.

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Kate Folk is the author of the novel Sky Daddy and the short story collection Out There. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, n+1, the New York Times, Granta, and The Baffler, among other venues. A former Stegner Fellow, she’s also received fellowships and residencies from MacDowell, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and Willapa Bay AiR. She lives in San Francisco.