The Divine Disgusting: Maya Chari Interviews K-Ming Chang
K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice books Bestiary and Gods of Want (One World/Random House), and two forthcoming books, a novel titled Organ Meats (One World) and a novella titled Cecilia (Coffee House Press). She lives in California.
You can also read K-Ming Chang’s flash fictions from our Brief Haunts web issue here.
From Associate Editor Maya Chari: Author K-Ming Chang’s newest book, Gods of Want, is a collection of mysteriously linked short stories circling themes of hunger, family, transformation, myth, and desire. I spoke with K-Ming about Gods of Want over the phone in November 2022. We discussed genre-recklessness, raccoons, the divine urge to swallow someone whole next to a trash river, and more. Our conversation was occasionally punctuated by the commentary of K-Ming's three birds. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity; regrettably, you will have to supply your own birdsong.
MC: Do you want to talk a little bit about how you got started writing?
K-Ming Chang: I've always loved reading and writing and storytelling. But I think the way that I entered it was actually first through oral storytelling, and being really interested in the performance of story and the embodiment of it. I feel like I fell in love with storytelling sitting at a dining room table, or in the kitchen after dinner, when people were telling stories and gossiping and spreading rumors. To me, storytelling was this really animated, improvisational form that was really playful and conversational, and allowed a collective to participate.
And then as I grew older, I kind of fell in love with the written forms of storytelling, and language. Especially poetry, I felt like, was so playful, it reminded me a lot of oral forms in a lot of ways. I started to marry those loves and those origins together.
I was a huge journal writer. I still have this huge bag of diaries that I filled up when I was a kid in my closet somewhere that I'm too mortified to look at, because I know it's full of rumors and gossip and lies. But there was always something a bit illicit about it, which is really fun. That feeling of eavesdropping. Wanting to write, because I was first a listener, or a member of an audience, or a witness.
Now, when I write, I try to combine both loves in a way, my love for various written forms, and text, but then also my love for spoken, oral forms. They're very contradictory forms, in certain ways—they're not compatible, inherently. So it's a really fun challenge.
MC: In your work, you seem to be really interested in lineages. So how do you think about your own literary lineage? Or are you more interested in other types of lineage? Do you see yourself as more descended from oral storytelling or from poetry?
KMC: I'm really obsessed with the question of lineage in both my writing and reading lives, and I'm definitely someone who's more interested in premise than the plot or action of a story. I just want to read one long extended prologue. One long expository premise. I don't need anything else.
I definitely see myself in multiple lineages, which is really fun because I think I write about characters who are oftentimes cobbling together their own lineages. And in the same way, I always feel like I'm building my own and collaging them together. So definitely my love for poetry is one lineage. And then there are a lot of writers I continually return to, like Marilyn Chang and Maxine Hong Kingston, and Dorothy Allison. And then I also have my familial lineage of storytelling, and I feel like that is maybe the strongest root of them all: being really tethered to family mythology and family stories and specifically, matriarchal storytelling, and stories that have been passed down from mother to mother to mother. And all of the fragmentation, invention, and fabulism that comes along with it. I feel like it's a combination of various different literary lineages, and then also personal lineages.
MC: A lot of your work blurs lines between different forms, like fiction and poetry, for example, or it plays with or outright upends the rules of narrative. Do you think you find yourself in a kind of rebellion against the traditional rules of whatever form you are working in? Is that something you're doing deliberately as a way of questioning those rules? Or does it just happen?
KMC: It's almost involuntary. It's also really frustrating and annoying for me as a writer, because I always joke that I'm genre-reckless. No matter what genre I'm writing in, I feel the need to push against it at the same time. So if I'm writing a short story, or a novel, for example, I find myself not writing within paragraphs, just as long blocks of text, or in very lineated forms, or kind of breaking grammar. And then when I'm writing poetry, I really want to be exhaustive and lean towards narrative and lean toward character, and persona, and all of these things that logically, would more usefully serve my prose.
I always find a sense of resistance in whatever form or genre I'm writing in. It’s like wading through mud or something. I'm pushing up against myself and my expectations of what this writing would turn out to be formally and structurally. And I don't really know where that impulse comes from, and why I'm always battling myself and why I want very narrative poetry and very poetic prose.
I think it’s a feeling of wanting to be expansive, and wanting to kind of lean across the page and feel like whatever I'm writing can touch all of those different lineages, or embrace them or honor in some way. That impulse to challenge what I'm writing, or what I think I'm writing, comes with a lot of mental wrestling, and questioning and doubting myself. But I think it's a lot more fun to write that way—to let my own sense of surprise override what I expect the writing to be.
MC: So, it’s like one form isn’t enough to contain the story that you're trying to tell?
KMC: Yeah, or it's almost like wanting to surprise myself above all else. And so if I sit down, thinking, “Okay, this is going to be a short story, and this is going to be narrative, and it's going to follow this one character,” if I know what it is, in my mind, there’s a lack of joy or pleasure in the writing. I feel that wanting to breach the form and reach outwards to something else, or bring in other elements, is also just a way of maintaining a sense of pleasure and joy and enjoyment in the process of creation. And it always makes it something more interesting than what I envisioned initially.
MC: Is it a challenge to keep that sense of joy and mystery when you’re finishing a story and revising it? Is that something you have to think about how to maintain?
KMC: Yeah, I definitely lose my love for my writing very quickly. My romance period with the writing is very, very short, and it just comes from those initial bursts of, “Oh, I didn't know this is what I was writing about! Ooh, this is an interesting sentence!” But I'm definitely someone who really resists revision and has a lot of difficulty returning to a piece of writing and finding some core in it that can keep it alive. I'm someone who always wants to move on instantly from whatever I've written to do something new. And kind of praying that whatever new thing I start comes out pristine and requires no revision, which never happens to anyone. Oftentimes, I have to give myself a sense of distance from the piece. And sometimes it's a matter of bringing in other voices and seeing what other people think about it and see in it. And then it kind of renews that passion or that spark.
Especially when I'm drafting something longer, like something novel-length, or book-length, I always reach a point where I'm just so utterly sick of it, that I'm like, "Okay, this is the end, I finished, I'm done with it." It's almost like I have this internal gauge. When I am just utterly sick of it, the book is done, or at least the first draft of the book is done. And so oftentimes, the revision process is going back and trying to figure out: Why did I want to stop here? Why did I kind of run out of fuel, what transformation needs to happen for me to find joy in writing it again? But it's definitely difficult to trust the process and the internal gauge that knows when to keep going, and when to take a break, and when to come back to things.
MC: You've written some very short stories, or flash in this collection, and elsewhere. What appeals to you about the very short form.
KMC: Flash fiction is my favorite form. I feel connected to this form in a way that I'm not to any other form. I feel kind of instantly at home, like I'm wading in the pond—I don't want to say comfortable necessarily, because I feel like the writing should feel exciting and new and different. But there's something about it that feels like coming home. And it's funny because I started writing it fairly recently compared to writing poetry and prose.
I found that flash is where my lineages can come together in the most effective way: my love of storytelling and narrative, but then also, my more poetic impulses of not necessarily wanting to create a plot or an arc, or to think about a bounded individual character, and wanting to really focus on language, and lingering on a single moment: all of those elements can come together in the flash form, in a way that’s really hard to do in a longer form—even in a short story.
There is something about that rush of writing a piece in one sitting that I love so much about writing poetry, it was almost like this ritual of: this is what happened in the moment. And that's how it is for me in flash fiction as well. It's this convergence of elements that just emerges in that one moment. I find that it's one of the forms that I revise or edit less. If I write a flash piece, and it's just not working, and there's nothing about it that's interesting to me, I just leave it behind. It's a lot more difficult to do that with something like a novel or short story, purely because of how many hours you put into it, the length of it, how laborious it is.
So flash, to me, is like the epitome of joy. Whenever I find myself dreading all else: I don't want to revise this, I don't want to draft this, I don't want to go back to this revision, the flash form always reminds me why I love to write. It makes me excited again.
MC: I'm really interested to hear you talk about why you love flash because I see your work as being very expansive and containing so many different things. I think that expansiveness, in contrast to the very short form creates some interesting things.
KMC: Yeah. It's kind of like what I was saying about wanting to break my own expectations of a form. I find that the smaller the form, the more intergenerational or sprawling or expository I want to make it. And so I ended up with like, three paragraphs of backstory that I'm enjoying and want to keep. And I let it be that.
MC: What is the relationship that stories in a collection have to each other? Are they siblings? Are they parts of a whole?
KMC: It’s interesting—readers of Gods of Want have different interpretations. I had people tell me all the stories kind of feel like siblings or sisters. I also wanted to plant the possibility—and a lot of people caught this, which was really exciting to me, because I was like, “Oh, authorial intent sometimes works!”—that maybe the narrator is the same in every story. There are a couple of stories that are in third person, but for the rest of the stories, I wasn't really trying to differentiate the voices, I was just interested in circling the same themes obsessively. And looking at them through these different myths and different women who might also be just one woman, which is also how I approached my first novel where there are three generations of women. I remember my editor even asked me: “To what extent do you want to differentiate these characters and have their voices be distinct?” It's intentional, I'm really interested in collapsing the distinguishing features between different narrators in the collection.
And I really wanted to embrace the circularity of a story. Oftentimes what unlocks a short story for me is that the ending comments directly on the beginning, or something from the beginning returns at the end. And that's when I know that the story is done, when the circle kind of loops in on itself, where the story is cannibalizing itself, in a certain way.
I think of the stories as one big loop. They're all just one story. Maybe like different facets of the same story, or all tying together into a circular obsession. It was really fun for me to think about: what are the words that I can repeat from story to story? And what are the cadences that I can have as a refrain for all of these stories?
MC: Did you see the stories as being narrated by the same person?
KMC: I wrote all the stories at different times, so they were never really linked. But there are certain phrases that repeat in the stories and my editor flagged them: this phrase or this exact metaphor repeats in two different stories or three different stories. I actually wanted to keep those because I found that there was some kind of collective consciousness happening across these stories. So for me, the narrator of the first story and the second story, when I wrote them, they were different people, but I liked the idea of thinking about all these characters as possible versions of each other. And that's definitely not a strict interpretation. I feel like it changes from day to day, but I just really enjoyed keeping certain resonances and repetitions between the characters. Even though while I was writing them, they were all different people, except for the character of Melon, who's just Melon.
MC: I wondered if some of the narrators were the same person, but I definitely thought of Gods of Want as being a story collection about one big family.
KMC: I love that. And I think there's something about a short story collection that can be communal in a way that other forms can't be. And I just love the idea of like a neighborhood of stories or like a family or a community of stories, that kind of overlap in certain ways, but then also have these like, offshoots, and different questions that they're asking. So that's also really gratifying to hear.
MC: How do you decide on the sequencing of the collection? And would you be upset if you heard that someone read it out of order?
KMC: No, I think that's so fun. I think it would be really interesting for people to experiment with the order. And especially because it's in a triptych structure, to read different sections out of order, like read the last section first, or the first section last, or second. Again, these stories are like a neighborhood. They're in an order, but it's not necessarily linear. You can kind of go up to any house and enter it, and they're all clustered together. And they are intentionally kind of planned in a certain architecture. But you as the reader get to kind of choose where to enter, which I love about story collections.
Interestingly enough, it was less the order of the stories that felt important to me and more about what stories were even included in the collection in the first place. Because I found that for the longest time in the editorial process, I didn't even know what stories were going to be in the collection. .I kept pulling stories and putting them back in. And I found that the questions of what stories go in and what the order is were actually one question, with one solution.
The way I ended up finding the order in the triptych structure is that I noticed there were a lot of repeating M-words from the collection, like melons, mouths, moths, mothers, and myths. And I decided, okay, I’m going to make a list of all of these words, but I'm going let the language lead me because I always feel like the language is a lot smarter than my logical mind. The language and the images in the book are kind of beyond me in a way. I'm doing more than I know I'm doing. And then when I sorted the stories into these different M words, I found that they organically clustered around mothers, myths, and moths. Creepily enough—it was really startling in the moment—each section, without me planning it, ended up naturally being almost the exact same number of pages. I felt like, this is a sign in word games from in the universe, that these three sections are meant to exist. And all of the stories fall symmetrically into these different categories. And then from there, finding the order felt a lot more intuitive. Because I knew the overarching structure of how these stories would be arranged, and I knew confidently what stories were going to be in the collection, which was a very clarifying moment.
“The girls in this story see this raccoon as a God, as a divine figure, not in spite of the trash creek, and its status as an animal, but because of it. And I think that was what I was really interested in exploring throughout all of these stories, which is this idea that divinity doesn’t exist in spite of dirt and crassness, and grossness, and the grotesque and the evil and the terrible, but because of all of those things. ”
MC: What does it mean to be a God of Want? How do you think about desire and the divine?
KMC: Desire and the divine, I love that so much! For a long time, I didn't know what the title of the collection was going to be, and I didn't want to choose the title of one of the stories themselves, because they just felt like they didn't fit very well. My editor was the one who actually highlighted "god of want" in one of the stories—it was describing a raccoon running across a creek made of trash. And I remember thinking, okay, that is so perfect, because it's just this microcosm image of all of the contrast I was interested in, which is divinity and cosmology combined with the crass, and the unseen or forgotten, or the discarded. Because raccoons are considered pest animals. They're not considered desirable at all. They’re scavengers and survivors. This is an image of being surrounded by garbage. But the girls in this story see this raccoon as a God, as a divine figure, not in spite of the trash creek, and its status as an animal, but because of it. And I think that was what I was really interested in exploring throughout all of these stories, which is this idea that divinity doesn't exist in spite of dirt and crassness, and grossness, and the grotesque and the evil and the terrible, but because of all of those things.
I really wanted to play with our idea of what is divine. So rather than cleanliness, and purity, and goodness, I was like, “Oh, I want the divine to be disgusting—the divine disgusting. And I feel like that's tied with desire for a lot of characters in this book. For these characters, these queer characters, oftentimes, desiring something and then also being really repulsed by it are the same feelings for them, or are tied together. Or desire and the want to commit an act of violence, or do something terrible—they're all kind of bound to each other. And it's one big complicated, embodied feeling rather than, you know, here's the category of things that are good and divine and things that are terrible and crass. It's all a whirl of things. It was fun to land upon that title and realize that it was commenting on so much about the book.
MC: I love that. And I love the idea of the raccoon being the symbol for that. There are a lot of raccoons in the book. In the story “Dykes,” there are raccoons that live in a flooded city and become eel-raccoons.
KMC: Yeah, I'm really interested in urban animals that subsist off of human waste. That’s why I've also recently been really obsessed with crows, because I found out that crow population growth follows the same trajectory as human population growth. So as the city grows, the number of crows grows along the same rate, and I was like, “Oh my god, that is incredible!” We are bound together, the more waste we create, the more we feed the crows. I’m very obsessed with symbiotic relationships to urban animals that are considered pests.
MC: The jacket copy for Gods of Want describes the style as “feminist fabulist.” I personally love and am obsessed with the word "fabulist.” I love that it literally means "liar.” What does fabulism mean to you? And do you see it as related to feminism in your work? How does this style of telling a story speak to the female experience specifically?
KMC: Wow, I love that question. I really love my editorial team for coming up with that phrase. Yeah, I love the fabulism-lying link. Because I love the performance of storytelling and inauthenticity. Whenever people talk about authenticity, I’m like, “No, be inauthentic! Lie! Fabricate! Make things up! Perform! Drama! That's what I really enjoy about storytelling.
Fabulism is perfect too because it also calls back to fables. And everything I write feels like a fable in a certain way, even if it takes place in this very contemporary setting, or is following an individual. I feel like myth-making is at the core of all of my impulses.
With feminism, for me, it's about recovering matrilineal history and storytelling within these familial structures that are very patriarchal, in which women are excluded from official record records, or narratives of any kind. I really wanted to write about an intergenerational world of women, in which the official records are just irrelevant, and the central relationships in these women's lives are with other women, whether that's a familial relationship, or a romantic relationship. I really wanted to, not discard, but resist certain narratives of girlhood and daughterhood that I grew up with, which is the idea that you exist to leave your family behind and to join another family and then take on that family's duties and join their patrilineage.
I find that oftentimes I write about girls who stay and who are obsessed with their materline and obsessed with these relationships they've been told to let go of: friendships with other women, relationships with their mothers and grandmothers. I just wanted to make those centered. And to write about the complexity and violence of their love.
I'm always writing against certain narratives of shame and erasure. It’s always really fun for me when people are like, “Oh, my God, I just didn't expect these stories to go that way. Or to delve so much in the body.” It’s really gratifying to hear because to me, the world of the body is very feminine and divine in a certain way. And it allows me to explore those contradictions: the grotesque and the beautiful at the same time.
MC: There are mythological creatures in the book, including the nine-headed bird featured on the cover. When you’re drawing from myths, do you mostly rely on stories that you've heard orally, from your family, or is it something that you research?
KMC: It's definitely mixed. Usually, the spark of wanting to do research into a particular mythical creature or mythology will come from a childhood story that I heard, or a story that my friends have told me, or joked about, or what I have floating in my mind, from some source that I might not even know fully, and then that kind of that drives my impulse to do some research. And sometimes I write without research, with just the memory of the stories that I've heard.
And usually, like 99.99% of the time, actually, I would say 100% of the time, it's very incorrect, because my memory has distorted it, and combined it with like 10 other stories or creatures, or the person who told me, gave me a version that just like doesn't exist anywhere that I can find on the internet or in a book. So I always try to listen to the writing first, rather than feeling like I have to adhere to research.
But I do research as much as possible, just because it can be really enjoyable to see the different fissures in my memory, and to see whether the story that I've heard belongs to a certain region or lineage, because sometimes I'll be like, “Oh, that's so cool. I didn't know this was like a specifically Taiwanese version of the story or a specific Fujianese version of the story.” And it just feels extra special.
Then other times, I'm like, I'm gonna rewrite this, whether it's rewriting the version that I heard, or the version I find in research. But I think more than anything, I try to look at the source of the consciousness of the character, and that oftentimes really transforms what that story is.
MC: Do you feel like that’s part of the essence of myth? That process of losing parts and combining things in your memory?
KMC: Yeah, definitely. Myths have so many archetypes that start to blur and overlap. Sometimes when you're telling a story, you’ll be like, wait a second, am I telling the Little Mermaid, is that the Little Red Riding Hood, was there a wolf in this? I find that it becomes almost like a collective consciousness or a collective collage of all of these various archetypes that speak to me as the core of my existential questions, or what I want to explore. I also think it's really interesting, again, to think about the lens of the character, because different characters will latch on to different aspects of the myth and contort them or exaggerate them, or probe them in their individual ways, depending on the circumstances of their own life and their own lineage.
I always start with: okay, this character is recounting this myth, this character has lived with this myth. It's something that's inside them. And what is it about this myth? What are they haunted by? What is that part of the myth that they resist or want to rewrite? And what are the parts that they cling to, or love, or see some version of themselves in? It always surprises me.
For example, one of the stories is about a snake train, and this goddess who created humanity, who's a serpent. I went in thinking, “Oh, I know this story. It’s a really interesting, possibly proto-feminist story about all life emerging from this giant snake woman.” That's really fascinating and powerful. And then as I was recounting how this narrator would tell the story to themselves—which I think is much more interesting than how we tell stories to other people. I realized that what this narrator was latching onto was this idea that the snake god had created two batches of people, and one group of people were divine and rich and handcrafted, and then the other group of people were just kind of flung like mud. And she's really, really obsessed with that differentiation, and identifies with the muddiness of that second batch of people, and that really surprised me. That's not even the aspect of the story that I necessarily thought I was most fascinated by, because I was so focused on the snake god and who the snake god was and what she represents. And here this narrator is kind of thinking about their own lineage through obsessing over the mud people. I always find that when I'm writing it's a process of transforming the myth rather than telling it.
MC: Transformation, if I'm not mistaken, is a central interest of yours. It seems like in the book, there's a very keen interest in the way that language shifts and is dynamic. And then the people and creatures and images can also change form. It reminds me of this quote, from Samantha Hunt's The Seas: "If one word can mean so many different things at once, I don't see why I can't." I'm wondering if you see these two things as related in your work: the language is flexible, so other things can be flexible. Creatures can turn into other creatures or people can turn into creatures.
KMC: Absolutely. First of all, I love that quote. It's amazing. I definitely agree, because all of my transformations begin in language, and they actually usually come from turning a metaphor literal. And I find a lot of joy in that, because it feels like language itself is a magic spell that is capable of transforming anything into anything, or reframing anything into anything. So oftentimes, the driving force of a certain conceit I have for a story is I have this metaphor, oh, you know, the sun is like an egg yolk. Why can't the sun be an egg yolk? Like, write a story about how the sun is literally an egg? And what comes out of it? What happens from it? That’s what my thought process is, this tactile language and metaphor that that feels really interesting in my mouth and looks really interesting on the page, then hatches an entire world. I want to make it actual and literal and realized for the characters in the story and for the world itself, to build out that metaphor and take that metaphor and push it to its absolute farthest point, and allow it to become like the logic of the world in a certain way. So yeah, I think that language can really subvert logic in a certain way and enable all of these different transformations.
“I’m always interested in, okay, this character doesn’t feel like they have agency as an individual—what would it mean, for them to have agency over the entire cosmology of the world? What if this mother character can make the sky every night? Or make the stars and the sun? What would that mean for their life and for agency, what does it mean to them, that kind of power? And for everyone else in the world to see and recognize that power? I feel like all these questions are always popping up for me.”
And again, it goes back to the pleasure and the joy and the fun of the writing. It comes from that sense of play of like, I'm just here casting magic spells on these characters you know, the sun is an egg—just playing around with a magic wand. And also giving the characters a certain kind of agency that is really fun to play with. Because oftentimes, the characters in my stories are wrestling with a lack of agency, or feeling like they can't intervene in any intergenerational violence, or a family conflict, or in whatever they see is the trajectory of their lives. I'm always interested in, okay, this character doesn't feel like they have agency as an individual—what would it mean, for them to have agency over the entire cosmology of the world? What if this mother character can make the sky every night? Or make the stars and the sun? What would that mean for their life and for agency, what does it mean to them, that kind of power? And for everyone else in the world to see and recognize that power? I feel like all these questions are always popping up for me.
MC: One of the most striking literal metaphors, I think, in the collection is in "Eating Pussy." A girl fantasizes about eating her crush, and that actually does swallow her whole. There's a lot of consumption in this book. There's a focus on what the characters are eating, but there’s also a lot of these characters who are young girls being consumed. And sometimes it's horrifying, like when the snake woman consumes them. And sometimes it is actually really joyful. I was wondering, what is striking about that idea of being consumed?
KMC: Wow, I love this question. I think that goes back to the divine desire question, because for me, it's this unity of beauty and disgust, the act of consumption. It’s this moment where everything that the characters find gross and repulsive about themselves, the world, or this other character can unite with everything we desire about them. And actually, part of what they desire is what is disgusting, as well. I find that there's a very visceral and embodied form of hunger and desire that can be really, really complicated. And tied with, again, that sense of, we're violent and repulsive.
It’s like anti-transcending in a certain way. Because I always noticed, especially in Western literature, it's really interesting to see stories end in transcendence, like an image of flight in the sky, and the sun and light, and I really love doing that too. I love to end on an image of light or the sky, and actually do that fairly frequently. But then I am also interested in anti-transcendence: the collapse into the earth and into poop and into excrement and into the divine disgusting, and eating and pooping and bodily fluids and engulfing someone or being engulfed. The anti-transcendent transcendent, if that makes any sense.
I also have always been really fascinated by monstrosity, and what it means to feel like a monster or to channel desire through a monstrous self. I think especially for these girls who come from generations of repressed desire or deferred desire, it's really interesting for me to see that accumulate into a kind of monstrosity. I feel like the consumption is like the consumption of generations. They’re making this individual choice or manifesting these individual desires in this moment, but it also feels compounded by all of the women that they come from and all of the creatures of the mythology that they come from, channeling through one body or oneself.
MC: I love that idea of anti-transcendence. I'm going to be thinking about that for a bit.
KMC: Yeah, once I started to notice the pattern of how every book and short story I read ended with, like, the sky or flight, I'm just like, “Oh my God, I need to end inside of a stomach or something. End inside of a jaw.”
MC: One thing that stood out to me was just how big the families are in this book, or depending on your interpretation, the family. In the first two stories alone, there’s this idea of having dozens and dozens of aunts and cousins. And I think that's something we don't see that much in fiction, because as fiction writers we're often told to have a manageable number of characters. And then there's the relationships between family members, which I find very real—they're fraught and troubled, sometimes, but still loving and vital. Can you talk about that sense of scale and complexity and how you rendered it on the page?
KMC: Oh, I love this question. And you're right, I feel like we're constantly being told don't introduce too many characters. Right at the beginning, in the first page, don't introduce too many characters. In the first page of this book, there are like ten characters, who might also just be one character.
I just realized there was something so artificial about writing about a nuclear family. It's just not my reality, it's not the reality of how I grew up. It's not the reality of the world I saw around me, or in the kinds of families that surrounded me. Either way, I was writing against this idea of a nuclear family, against this idea that these roles of mother, father, son, daughter, are more important than relationships between grandmothers and grandchildren, between aunts and nieces. And that those are in some ways really rigid, or strict and hierarchical—there are definitely a lot of hierarchical familial relationships in the book, but I was really interested in the ways that daughters become mothers and they mother their mothers and mother their grandmothers, and they're also mothered by 500 other women in the neighborhood.
And again, this idea of expansion, and the idea that there's something very transient about motherhood as well—that in the lives of these characters, there are so many different mothers, sisters, and brothers that come and go throughout their lives. Even though there is something momentary about these relationships, the impact of them is permanent and really integral to forming who they are.
For the first two stories, in some ways, it's like two different kinds of collectives. “Auntland” was more about honoring the maternal lineage of this character, and the mass of mothers that they've had throughout their life. Whereas the second story, “The Chorus of Dead Cousins,” was about someone who was running away from the collective of their family and saw their family as something kind of shameful because of this sprawling, messy, violent nature, who in the end comes to accept it, because you know, they're in the sky, and they're a tornado so of course, they're a part of me and I opened my mouth to them. It’s really interesting to approach the collective or the sprawling, multi0directional facets of these families from different angles. Some people want to run away from it, and some people want to run toward it, which is really fun.
But definitely, I was interested in breaking down certain patriarchal nuclear family ideas and the rigidity of that.
MC: I interpret your work as being quite joyful, even though there's obviously pain and tragedy and conflict in the stories. And I know that a lot of writers talk about how that's a very hard thing to depict. Is it something that you're conscious of, writing towards joy?
KMC: I'm really glad to hear that. I think I'm always afraid it’s too much, it's too dark or too violent. For me, it's a matter of reframing my mentality, rather than trying to inject something into the writing that is deliberately joyous, or deliberately funny. I oftentimes find that pain and joy, or pain and pleasure, or joy, and sadness, and various other emotions, they're all kind of knotted together. And those are the things I want to write toward. If something doesn't contain a little bit of its opposite, it might not even be necessary or interesting for me to write about or explore. In my mind, if I'm like, “Oh, my God, this is gonna be really sad and devastating for the character,” there ends up being some shadow of humor, or joy, or anticipation. And then vice versa, if I'm writing and this is kind of funny for this character to say, there's oftentimes an edge of darkness to it. And when there's the absence of that, when something feels too simplistic, it usually ends up falling flat. I know I haven't found the moment.
I always try to remind myself: it's not about injecting something external into the writing that I think it needs, it's about just seeing what's on the page, and realizing that more facets of it can be brought out. And that the humor and the joy always exists in the writing, no matter how sad or painful it might seem. And it's just a matter of being able to tease it out from some of the existing emotions that already have been written. I find that takes the pressure off the need to make it artificially joyous or funny in a certain way. I'm always like, don't worry about feeling like you have to have a moment of joy in there. It is in there. It just exists where you don't expect it.
MC: Also, you seem like somebody who takes a lot of playfulness and pleasure in the language itself, in actually putting words together.
KMC: That's really true. I think that no matter what I'm writing, like, no matter the content of what I'm writing, I'm always having fun. With my first novel, that was the feedback I got back from my editor: “I can tell even when it gets heavy and dark, that you're having fun.” And that was so gratifying to hear. Because, again, for me, it's not about capturing this authentic emotion. Because I come from this lineage of performative storytelling, in a certain way I always feel like I'm making a stage and I'm making a set, and I'm performing the thing. So. it's not to say the performance of the tragedy isn't tragic, but there's a level of pleasure in it. And there's a level of art and craft, and fun and artifice to it that I want the reader to see.
MC: Besides yours, of course, what is the book that everyone who reads this interview should read?
KMC: Actually, funnily enough, I was just thinking about this book, because it reminds me of the question about like, huge familial collectives and how we often don't see those literature and that we're not taught that’s a thing we can do. Because the story that inspired “Auntland,” “The Chorus of Dead Cousins” and “Resident Aliens,” and a lot of stories that focus on collectives of cousins, aunts, mothers was a short story called "River of Names" in a book called Trash by Dorothy Allison. And it gets taught fairly frequently. But it was the first short story I ever read in a class about short stories, and it completely blew my mind. And, immediately it's like 50 different characters. And it's very much in the expository mode and the telling mode, and it's just so brilliant. And "River of Names" says it all—it means it's going to be this coursing, just surge of family stories. That book was so transformative to me. And as a story collection, it definitely guided a lot of my choices in my own writing, as well.
Maya Chari is an MFA candidate at Arizona State University and an associate editor at Hayden's Ferry Review.