3 Questions with Kim Parko
KIM PARKO gathers in the hedge. She is the author of The Grotesque Child (Co-winner 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Press Book Prize) and Cure All (Caketrain Press, 2010). Her writing has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Boston Review (2018 Poetry Prize), Black Warrior Review, The Brooklyn Review, DIAGRAM, Salt Hill, POETRY, Best Small Fictions 2023, and elsewhere. She is a professor at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Associate Editor Noa Padawer-Blattm talks Kim Parko about their work from Issue 76, available now!
This is only an excerpt of a larger story, but I'm so curious about the process of writing this kind of piece. What was your writing and drafting process like? What was the process to get from idea to where the story stands now?
My writing process for this piece was iterative and processual—a step into the narrative led to the next step. There was no predetermined route, so my imagination was the catalyst at every pulse. I stepped as Junior from one realm into another and allowed myself to see through Junior's eyes. I let the narrative shape from each successive vision-field Junior encountered. In this excerpt, the process begins with Junior's trip to the city.
The voice in this excerpt, and Junior's voice in general, is so stylistically specific. Spare, and yet completely immersive, completely specific. I'm thinking about your dialogue aesthetic here, too. How did you land on this voice -- both for Junior and as the guiding voice in this excerpt?
Because Junior exists in a fluid, shape-shifting realm and in a fluid, shape-shifting beingness, Junior possesses a mythos consciousness that I sensed into through Junior’s and/both qualities of bemusement/wonder/awe/repulsion/acceptance/refusal/humor/horror in relation to the constantly morphing conditions, settings, and situations enfolding in the story, feelings that I sometimes share in my own uncertainties, dis/orientations, and contemplations within the known/unknown.The larger story further explores Junior's fluid mythos consciousness in a relational dance with the ambiguous and controlling power of Junior’s Senior.
In the dialogue between Junior and the doctor in the story, I was exploring desires within the doctor that are not fully conscious to him because of the assumed ethics of his profession and its positivist worldview. Through dialogue between Junior and the doctor, there are inquiries for me around boundaries, logos invasions into mythos, and ambiguities in healing/harms.
Is there anything else about “Born and Died” that you’d like to share, about content or process, that we wouldn’t know at first glance?
I’m interested in stories as imaginariums and what might be provided for a story’s generation/regeneration in the imaginarium that may not be accessible in linear, realist ontologies.