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Seven questions with novelist Karen Russell
The 'Swamplandia!' author opens up about her editing process and shares tips for discovering your writing voice.
Karen Russell, novelist and short story writer. © John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation–used with permission.
For novelist and short story writer Karen Russell, there’s no subject too unusual to tackle. Her critically-acclaimed debut novel Swamplandia! centers around a family of alligator wrestlers, while her short story collection St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves contains ten equally outlandish tales. What inspires this gifted author, and why is she so interested in exploring the boundaries between fantasy and reality? In preparation for her upcoming visit to Interlochen Arts Academy, Russell shared insights into her writing process, revealed the authors that continue to inspire her, and offered tips on finding your voice as a writer.
What’s your writing process like? How does it start?
I make a really big mess with my first draft. I have to write a lot to even begin to understand what I'm writing about, or why something called me to write about it. Whether I’m writing an essay that's 1,000 words, or if I'm writing a 9,000-word short story, or if I'm writing a novel—whatever the constraint is, I usually write three times that much. Not everyone needs to have that ratio. But I find that I have to do a lot of writing that doesn't show up in the published draft.
How do you edit your work?
Reading out loud helps me a lot, because you can start to hear, even just within the first sentences of a paragraph, where things are stagnating or you’re becoming repetitive. I also try to remember that I’m writing to discover something. When a story doesn’t work for me, it’s because my critical brain has gotten out in advance of my creative one, and I've decided too soon what this thing is going to be. Writing works best when I’m just riding the waves and letting the work have a life of its own. It’s hard because it means living with uncertainty, just trusting your subconscious. You have to trust that if you follow the original spark that drew you to write about this thing and listen to it, it will teach you what it wants to be.
When did you know that you wanted to be a writer?
I think it happened in direct correlation to my becoming a reader and spending a lot of my daylight inside books. I felt like I did all my real living inside of books. Writers need books like oxygen. It’s not hyperbole—the books are our homes in the world. The poet Maureen N. McLane says in her extraordinary My Poets that books gave her “deep seas in which to swim and make a self.” In proportion to the delight that books gave me and how much I needed them, my wish to be a writer grew. Even when I was a younger writer, I was trying to create those deep seas on paper.
Your book Swamplandia! frequently blends reality with elements of fantasy. Why do you find the genre of magical realism so appealing?
I’m always a little skeptical of the binary we create between fantasy and reality. So, in Swamplandia!, you might find a red alligator, for example, or maybe it seems like a ghost is eloping with your sister. I'm fascinated by the potency of the perceiver and the degree to which we're always collaborating with external reality. Sometimes people ask me about the speculative elements in my stories, wanting to know for certain if a seeming violation of natural law was a manifestation of a character’s grief or a real ghost, for example. I am happy for readers to leave asking those questions. My favorite stories haunt me, and if my own stories have an aim, it’s to become what my professor and mentor Ben Marcus called “permanent cargo inside the reader.” To me the truly interesting question feels like: what can I see in this ghostly lighting that is ordinarily occluded from my perception? What truths, what possibilities does this syncretism of reality and fantasy reveal to me that I wouldn’t be able to see in noonlight, under the spell of my own name?
What helped you become the writer you are today?
My teachers opened so many doors for me. Some of them were people I’ll never meet, people who taught me on paper, like Toni Morrison. I also had incredible high school and elementary school English teachers who reminded me that I could do more than just write a sentence—I had something to say. Going to an MFA program definitely helped, but you don't have to go to an MFA program to be a writer. There’s no one path. It's not like being an engineer, or even an astronaut, where you get these particular credentials and go on this particular track. It's such an individual process.
Pay attention to where your pleasure is, what feels urgent to you, what you can bring to life. There's a poem, a story, a song that only you can hear, and only you can write.
How do you develop your own voice as a writer without simply imitating others?
I think you do have to imitate others for a while. I went through phases where I imitated authors like Louise Erdrich or George Saunders, because I loved their prose and their style. But I think that's just part of the process. Everyone has such a unique consciousness. Maybe you do assimilate some of those strong voices from other authors, and maybe they guide you, but eventually you start to trust this inner knowing. For me it was a kind of capitulation. I had some received ideas about what “great literature” was, but eventually I realized that the stories I really wanted to write featured ghost birds, sober vampires, and alligator wrestlers. For me, the stuff that seemed almost silly was where I felt the most alive. Pay attention to where your pleasure is, what feels urgent to you, what you can bring to life. There's a poem, a story, a song that only you can hear, and only you can write.
What are you looking forward to about working with Interlochen students?
I really love working with young people and I'm excited to hear from them. They’re so alert to what makes their voices idiosyncratic and alive. At this age, there's a kind of beautiful unselfconsciousness and a real willingness to ride the wave in writing. There’s a midnight joy of just seeing what they can bring to life on paper through playing around and groping in the dark and experimenting. You can lose that over time, even when you develop more control of your narrative effects. But that kind of spontaneous yelp of joy that is writing when you're a young person, just to see what you can do, like trying out your instrument, and riffing on it… I love contacting that energy.
Learn more about Creative Writing at Interlochen Arts Academy.
