The Weird Mundane: A Conversation with Kate Folk
Every writer has their obsessions, and the best short story collections lay out these obsessions like treasures for the reader. Kate Folk’s debut collection, Out There, is full of treasures that invite close examination. I read the stories the way one might sift through a collector’s polished rock collection, turning each one over in my hands to see the different ways they catch the light. And while at first glance it may seem the treasure is the premise, such as the blot stories where handsome artificial men lurk on dating apps to seduce women and steal personal data, there is something greater at work: a blending of the ordinary with the otherworldly, a kind of third space that is both new and at once familiar, made from where the two touch.
What the light catches in Folk’s work is how her characters are always searching for meaning. It is not only the meaning of the earth-eating void in “Void Wife” that propels the reader forward, but the meaning of loneliness. Elsewhere, “The Last Woman on Earth” is not interested in why there is only one woman left, but what it would mean to live with such celebrity. Each story uses a strange proposition for characters to examine their lives, relationships, and choices. If the worlds in Folk’s fiction are alien, then they are also equally familiar. Characters’ bones may be dissolving at night, and heads may be growing up from the floor, but in the meantime they flirt in front of daytime television—and who hasn’t been there in one way or another?
Folk met with me over Zoom, where we spoke in that strange but now familiar virtual space. Below is a transcript of our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity.
Margaret LaFleur: Out There is a collection that is hard to nail down. The stories draw on technology, bits of magical realism, and elements of horror. I’m curious if there’s a literary tradition you are drawn to? Or perhaps a style or genre you see your stories as a part of?
Kate Folk: Yes, I think of it as literary fiction with speculative elements in it, which is sort of popular right now. Like the work of Carmen Maria Machado, Karen Russell, Kelly Link, and George Saunders—writers like that. It also goes back farther: I’m writing an introduction to a reissued book by British sci-fi writer John Wyndham called Trouble with Lichen right now. He called what he was trying to do “logical fantasy.” At the time—he was writing in the forties through the sixties—popular sci-fi was much more of the space opera variety and that kind of thing. Wyndham was writing more grounded sci-fi; he would start with a sci-fi premise and then see how it would play out in our world. He was really inspired by HG Wells too. My collection is kind of in that tradition too, of sci-fi that is grounded in everyday reality. Just taking the premise and playing it out.
ML: Tell me a little about putting together this collection. How long have you been working on it, and what was the process like?
KF: It was a long process. The oldest story in the book I wrote in 2013, and then there were stories that I wrote in the last couple of years while in the Stegner program. It’s hard to put together a story collection that feels cohesive but not like the stories are all the same. It’s a tough balance. There were previous iterations of the collection under a different title with different stories and some overlap. But when I looked back on it, I realized it seemed like a lot of stories were put together arbitrarily; I had this goal of making it feel like there was a journey from beginning to end of the book. When I put together this version, it was important to me to have the blot stories as bookends. That made sense to me because “Out There” is a story of a character seeking connection and not finding it. The end is a bit unresolved. “Big Sur,” at the end of the book, is another story with the blot premise, where someone does connect with a blot. I was thinking about the trajectory from seeking to finding throughout the book, which became how I chose to order the stories. “The Bone Ward” is the centerpiece. It’s the nadir of that searching and not finding and being annihilated because of the searching.
From there, I saw the stories as opening a bit and having characters find what they’re looking for a bit more, until the final story. It was interesting to see how taking out some of the stories from the original version of the collection made it stronger overall. Before, when I was trying to just generate enough work for a collection, I thought, Well, just throw everything in there and, you know, make it the length of a book. But once I had more than enough stories it became a process of curating and seeing how these stories fit together.
ML: I want to steal a phrase from your publicist, who called it a “perfectly weird book for our very weird times.” How much do you relate to the weirdness of your fiction? If all the stories published by The New Yorker in a year were people at a party, would “Out There” be the weird one?
KF: I guess so, in a way! It does have that sci-fi element with the blots. But it’s also a very grounded story. It is part of how that story is trying to work, with the mundane contrasted with an otherworldly element. I was surprised, really, that The New Yorker wanted to publish it because I was more accustomed to reading traditional, realist fiction in there. I always love Rebecca Curtis’s stories in The New Yorker, and I feel like those can be very weird despite being realism. I think that “Out There” would be in good company, in terms of weird people at the party.
ML: “Out There” is probably the story that people have read, and it’s the title of the collection. Is it your favorite or do you have another favorite story?
KF: I think my favorite story is “Big Sur,” the second blot story. I was curious about seeing more of the blots on the page and getting to know them on their own terms. So I wrote “Big Sur” and that felt like it came naturally, which usually isn’t the case with my writing. In reading it and seeing the effects it had on other people, it felt like it was doing something authentically emotional within that premise, especially within the arc of a love story that, of course, is doomed. It’s a longer story and it’s able to play out fully.
ML: It’s the longest in the collection, right?
KF: Yes, it’s the longest, at 43 pages. It could be a novella, I think. “The Bone Ward” is another favorite of mine just because I worked on it for so long and it went through so many iterations.
ML: Many of your stories end in this moment before a kind of darkness descends, figuratively or literally. It made me think of the famous saying that a short story’s ending should be surprising and yet inevitable. How much do you write towards an ending, and how do you see the endings of the stories in this collection working together?
KF: I don’t usually know what the ending is going to be when I start. I often start with the opening line. Once I get the first sentence right the story can unfurl from there. Some of the endings I didn’t get right on the first try. After feedback from early readers I was able to tweak it. In the original ending of “Out There” the unnamed narrator walks away from the blots sitting at the table. But in workshop someone asked, “What if she goes towards the blots?” and just that one action completely changed the ending. It was important that the ending felt a bit open-ended but also to have a direction to point to so readers could imagine what was going to happen next without having things be one hundred percent clear.
ML: I love looking at the acknowledgements in books. You thank many teachers and friends, but since your collection deals with many non-human forces like technology, I wonder what you might include if you had to thank non-human forces. What helped support the collection or your writing life?
KF: The internet has been very formative for me, in good and bad ways, like being on Twitter, and feeling like my life is lived on the computer and on the internet to a large extent. Which, yes, is kind of depressing, but it’s also the way things are now. It has also helped me to connect with people in ways that I might not have because I’m very introverted. I can be someone else on the internet, or have a persona that’s me, but slightly tilted.
Living in San Francisco has been formative for me too. I really came of age here as a writer and as a person. The city has seeped into my writing in various ways: the weather, the fog, and the cold; the tech industry and the way it both creates this sense of infinite possibility and feels very alienating in a way. I’ve never worked in tech, but I’ve lived among tech the whole time I’ve lived here. People often recall an earlier era in San Francisco that I wasn’t really here for, but there are still vestiges of that city, which makes the city really special. There are dystopian elements here too—like the extreme wealth inequality on display in San Francisco, which is a phenomenon that’s happening everywhere but is heightened in San Francisco. All of it definitely has inspired my imagination a lot, even if sometimes living here feels strange, unpleasant.
There is a recurring theme of houses and apartments taking on their own sinister agency, in malevolent ways sometimes, throughout the collection. I think that came from living in the same apartment for over 10 years. Before I moved last summer I lived in the same studio apartment in the Richmond district for over a decade, which is wild to think about, about what a percentage of my life that is. I loved the apartment, and it started to feel like it was an extension of myself. And when things would happen to it, like the paint peeling or the radiator doing something weird, it felt very personal.
ML: Anything else you want to say about the collection? Maybe you can share a little about your experience with literary magazines in connection with these stories.
KF: I’ve had so many good experiences with journals. I love McSweeney’s, who first published “The Bone Ward.” I think they’re always doing great stuff. I also really love Gigantic Sequins. I had a story published there that isn’t in the collection. They’re so supportive and hype up their contributors’ writing successes, even years later. ZYZZYVA is a great San Francisco journal that has been really supportive of me.
I also worked as an editor for journals over the years with Your Impossible Voice and Joyland. Those years helped me become a better editor of my own work, in addition to putting together readings and events, like Quiet Lightning, a great submission-based reading series in SF that I curated for a few times.
It was a long process, getting to this point and publishing this book. There were a lot of attempts that didn’t pan out. This also isn’t the first book I’ve written, and I think that’s important for people to know. When I saw other people’s books come out, it always looked easy, or I thought it was easy. It definitely hasn’t been a linear trajectory for me. But I’m really glad to be publishing this book now, after about twelve years of writing seriously. It all helped me see how to put together something larger out of smaller components.
Kate Folk (@katefolk) has written for publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and ZYZZYVA. She’s received support from the Headlands Center for the Arts, MacDowell, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Recently, she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. She lives in San Francisco. Out There is her first book.
Margaret LaFleur (@margosita) can often be found reading over the heads of her small children. She writes and teaches in St. Paul, Minnesota.