Lit Hub Asks: 5 Authors, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers

The Lit Hub Author Questionnaire is a monthly interview featuring seven questions for five authors with new books. This month we talk to:

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Amity Gaige  (Heartwood)
Kevin Nguyen (Mỹ Documents)
Ken Kalfus (A Hole in the Story)
Ariel Courage (Bad Nature)
Annie Hartnett (The Road to Tender Hearts)

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Without summarizing it in any way, what would you say your book is about?

Amity Gaige: It’s about missing the sense of orientation one feels as a child in a mother’s arms.

Kevin Nguyen: Mỹ Documents is about how creating art and telling stories are the ways human beings adapt and survive, and also how there’s no one that can annoy you more than your family.

Ken Kalfus: Sexual harassment. Washington journalism. Blind spots, personal and journalistic. Fantasy baseball and other fantasies. Twitter As We Once Knew It. A restroom at Chi-Chi’s.

Ariel Courage: Decayed environments and relationships, poisonous personalities, postindustrial relics, toxic femininity, emotional impoverishment, redemptive love.

Annie Hartnett: A dark comedy about small town America, parenting, a cat who can predict death, shoplifting, good luck, bad luck, second chances, and a red Volvo nicknamed the Bird Barn. Mostly, 350 pages of me (writer) trying to make you (dear reader) chuckle in bed while you read.

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Without explaining why and without naming other authors or books, can you discuss the various influences on your book?

Kevin Nguyen: Akira Kurosawa’s I Live in Fear, family recordings, that video where Gal Gadot got famous people to sing “Imagine” really poorly.

Annie Hartnett: Coen brothers movies—Raising Arizona and Fargo in particular. John Prine songs. A challenge to myself to put every bad thing that could happen to a person in the book, but make it funny. My agent always called it Final Destination, but let’s make it a comedy. Also a love of other people, especially children, and a love of animals and the natural world.

Ariel Courage: Despair, conservative radio, bad memories, worse headlines, long drives.

Ken Kalfus: It was mostly other people’s stories, listening to them at the time of #MeToo. Women friends were telling me privately of their own on-the-job encounters that could have been defined as harassment and in any case made them feel hurt, confused or angry. Men told me stories too. These were painful, disappointing stories, revealing the characters of the men and women involved, as well as the character of society. These incidents were often immersed within a nimbus of ambiguity. Novelists are always drawn to ambiguity.

Amity Gaige: Countless crucial influences. Podcasts about medical professionals reporting from inside hospitals during the pandemic. Riding along with game wardens in Maine and watching them eat lunch out of Tupperware. Hiking to a spot in the woods where a lost hiker once built her final campsite. Looking up at the treetops, talking to her. Trees themselves. Words for trees: stemflow, blowdown, heartwood.

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Without using complete sentences, can you describe what was going on in your life as you wrote this book? 

Ariel Courage: Mask chin-sweat, long lonely park walks, hot summer couch-naps.

Amity Gaige: Living through a pandemic, along with the entire world. Going stir crazy. Being consoled by nature. Studying birdsong. Learning about edible plants. Also, publicizing my previous novel, Sea Wife, via Zoom (was lonely)!

Kevin Nguyen: Trapped inside during the pandemic listening to crunchy, gnarly ambient music.

Ken Kalfus: Mostly trying to write complete sentences. My ordinary life: gazing at the screen, typing a few words with one finger. Then out the window onto the street. Then back to the screen. But also the publication of a new novel, 2AM in Little America, which happily reminded me that you will eventually hit Send.

Annie Hartnett: Anxiety. Parenting. Suffering and joy.

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What are some words you despise that have been used to describe your writing by readers and/or reviewers?

Ken Kalfus: “You’re so funny! You should write something funny.” I swear, I try. A Hole in the Story is a comic novel, whatever the subject matter suggests.

Amity Gaige: “Well researched.” My books totally are well researched, but let’s be honest, anyone using the clinical term “well researched” was not sufficiently moved or convinced by the book.

Ariel Courage: I’ve been called a hippie because of the environmental themes of my work. I don’t despise hippies, but I do resent the implication that, in an era when the effects of climate change and pollution are widespread and visible, only tree-hugging loonies care.

Kevin Nguyen: Timely.

Annie Hartnett: When my first book, Rabbit Cake, came out, there was a very nice review with one single negative line in it, and of course I only absorbed the negative line and don’t remember the rest. It was: “Sometimes Hartnett veers toward the silly.” It actually totally shut me down, because I agree that my work can be silly—I am a silly and mischievous person, and I think my work is silly and mischievous—but it hurt to hear that phrased as a real negative thing, something that made the book worse. But I decided, eventually, after a good long break from writing, that silly is something I like about my own work, so I went to etsy and had those words carved into a wooden sign and now I have VEER TOWARD THE SILLY hanging over my writing desk. I’ve leaned into it rather than away from it, but it really bothered me at one point. But you can call me silly now. I am silly as hell at this point. The new book is about a cat who can predict death.

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If you could choose a career besides writing (irrespective of schooling requirements and/or talent) what would it be?

Ariel Courage: Writing is unstable, and healthcare isn’t free, so like many others I technically have chosen a parallel career (medical editing, supplemented by the occasional teaching gig). If I could choose anything, though, I’d love to be a Receiver of Memory, like in The Giver. A professional experiencer. It always appealed to me despite the dystopian circumstances.

Annie Hartnett: I’d love to be anyone who spends their life on stage. Singer, comedian, auctioneer. I’m kind of introverted, but there is no better feeling than being on stage. Everyone looking at you, what a thrill!

Amity Gaige: I’d want to be a journalist in the ‘90s.

Kevin Nguyen: DJ (not a good one).

Ken Kalfus: Astronomer, especially if we disregard schooling requirements and talent—and also math skills and decent eyesight. I have an abiding interest in the night sky. I was able to get some of that into my 2013 novel, Equilateral.

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What craft elements do you think are your strong suit, and what would you like to be better at?

Ken Kalfus: I can deliver a joke (I insist!). I spend a lot of time trying to get the style and voice right and I think the effort pays off: mostly everything else in a novel, including the plot and the characters who inhabit it, will follow from how I decide to tell the story. But not everything. I still have to make sure the story does the work I’ve asked of it, especially in expressing its themes. My writing may also have other, more specific deficiencies, but I prefer for the reader to discover them on their own.

Amity Gaige: I think my prose style is my best and worst trait. Some folks find my poetic prose style overdone. I get it. But I can’t help myself! I love words and pairing words and choosing words that illuminate an image or idea. Sometimes I stop and think, would my character use that word? In my dreams she would! I need to be more disciplined with these flourishes if they don’t suit the character.

Kevin Nguyen: I think I’m inventive with structure; it’s also the thing I want to keep getting better at.

Annie Hartnett: I think I’m great at first and final sentences and generally pretty good at story structure. I struggle to get to the inner emotions of a character, and I always reach for the joke instead. I always do what I call an “emo-edit” where I go through my draft and find places to *insert emotion here.*

Ariel Courage: I admit to liking my own imagery and syntax, though even then I’m often shocked by the number of cringe-inducing clunkers I find in revisions. I also sometimes lapse into a flat, ironical tone that permeates everything and makes my characters sound the same. It’s like a dry rot. I’d like to be better at avoiding that.

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How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything?

Annie Hartnett: I don’t know… I write to delight people. I don’t think I am a brilliant intellectual or that my novels are going to solve the world’s problems, but I do think I can delight you. And you don’t have to read it if you aren’t delighted. Move along. DNF, as they say.

Amity Gaige: I think you supply the answer in the question. It’s hubris! Hubris is its own punishment. Best to accept we are all flawed people, hungry for love, those who write novels and those who don’t.

Ken Kalfus: What, you mean they don’t? Hmm. Well, as a reader, I’m often moved, enriched, comforted and amused by writers who have just enough hubris to express what interests them. So I myself write in the hope, often forlorn, that my own hubris will entertain someone along the way.

Ariel Courage: By letting my agent and editor decide if what I have to say is worth trying to publish. I’m going to write regardless of the level of interest—it’s a compulsion, I’m not a well person—so I may as well try to do something with it.

Kevin Nguyen: This administration is working very hard to squash our First Amendment rights, so this is a good time to listen to anyone and everyone.