Fire Season: A Conversation with Kate Milliken
In the opening sentence of her debut novel, Kept Animals, Kate Milliken doesn’t meander through florid establishing shots: she lights a wildfire. Literally. It’s November 1993, and a fire is burning through Topanga Canyon, a dry, dusty place outside Los Angeles that’s reliant on horses and hierarchies. Here Charlie begins narrating the story of her mother Rory—a ranch hand at the stable her stepfather manages—and unraveling what happened that unseasonably warm fall before the fire took everything.
I spoke with Milliken over email about horseback riding, celebrity, and the potent history of Los Angeles in the early 1990s.
Elizabeth Gonzalez James: Can you tell me your inspiration for writing the book? What was the seed?
Kate Milliken: My first book was a collection of stories in which two friends, two teenage girls, reappear. I sensed I wasn’t done with them, that I needed a larger structure to capture their experience and the world that shaped them, but it wasn’t until I came across a series of photographs by Francesca Woodman in an old issue of The Missouri Review that I recognized the feeling I needed to write toward. Woodman’s influence on Rory’s photographs, especially in a scene in which she photographs Vivian in the abandoned house, is apparent if you know Woodman’s work. That scene was actually the first scene I wrote for the book, but it now appears about three-quarters of the way through.
EGJ: Are you an avid rider yourself? If so, do you think horseback riding informed your writing? Are there any lessons that can be carried from one discipline to the other?
KM: I haven’t ridden competitively or with any regularity since I was in high school, but the time I spent with horses then taught me the power of empathy, and the importance of patience and perseverance. Naturally, all three are invaluable in life, but they’ve certainly helped me as a writer. I also think there’s something to the horse and rider connection that is not unlike the writer and reader connection. Each are nearly indescribable relationships, yet they require such a depth of trust, a trust that is earned by the rider or writer alone. A horse wants to trust you, but if you don’t believe in yourself, they will feel that through the reins, your seat, the unsteadiness of your heart. That same invisible vibration is palpable between the writer and the reader through the words on the page.
EGJ: In the novel Rory lives next door to a movie star. I’m curious about this proximity to celebrity—does celebrity permeate everything in LA, and how do you think that influences stories set there?
KM: I think even in stories about LA where the elements of celebrity aren’t a large component, its presence is still felt, like the ocean or the smog; you’re always aware they are there even if you can’t see them. Celebrity, Hollywood, it’s just part of the landscape, the atmosphere. My mom and I moved to LA from Chicago when I was eight and the conversations at dinner and at school went quickly from politics and sports to who could land a meeting with XYZ and who was related to which movie director. I don’t live in LA anymore, but when I visit I feel this rush of inspiration. It’s an enormous art collective, everyone creating and striving to be recognized for what they make, but I think the flip side of that can be a self-defeating preoccupation with something unattainable, something made of ether. Obviously, the character of Vivian, as the child of a celebrity, feels this most profoundly, her father’s status in Hollywood requiring of them a certain denial of what is real.
EGJ: As the novel progresses Rory discovers her talent for photography at the same time she’s uncovering her own sexual identity. I’m curious about how Rory is seen and unseen, and how she controls this by being on the other side of the lens while putting others in it. Photographing others while being functionally unseen herself gives her a position of power that her subjects don’t enjoy. How did this dynamic evolve over your writing? And how do you think artistic and sexual discovery overlap and inform one another?
KM: Rory grew up in a house where she’s fearful of her mother, and to avoid conflict she learned to become invisible, to escape to her attic bedroom and find solace at the barn, where her mother won’t go. Living with fear, as a child, can make you hyper-observant of the world, though maybe not necessarily of yourself. You’re more reactive to the world than aware of how you yourself are feeling. Rory’s self-awareness and identity, in all of its forms—as a friend, as a sexual being, as someone with autonomy from her mother—grows as she develops her vision as an artist. One necessitates the other, I think. The more specific her viewpoint, the more specific she becomes. And yes, there is a power in that viewpoint, one she doesn’t fully comprehend. And out of a lingering innocence and adrenaline she ultimately misuses it, disempowering Vivian by forgetting her for who she is and robbing her of her viewpoint. All of this—the power dynamic and sexual awakening—was, honestly, present for me when I saw those Francesca Woodman images. It just took me nine years to manifest it through a story.
EGJ: Ethnicity and class play a huge role in the narrative, with the Leaning Rock Ranch functioning as a convergence point for many different parties: the wealthy children of a plastic surgeon, the ranch hand son of undocumented immigrants, a surf Nazi (this is a thing!) and others. Did this convergence play a part in your selection of a ranch as the setting for the novel? The parts of the novel set at Leaning Rock take place in 1993—do you still see a horse ranch as a place that brings together many different kinds of people?
KM: Absolutely. The diversity of worlds that exist at a barn are a large part of why I set the novel there. The setting of Topanga, in particular—an isolated community, yet emblematic of Los Angeles—lent itself to a layered story. I’ve no doubt the equestrian world remains diverse, but surely the cultural hierarchies are also still present.
EGJ: I’m curious about your choice to set the novel largely in 1993. It’s one year past the riots, a few months before the Northridge earthquake, and one year before OJ Simpson is arrested. The energy throughout the novel feels both potent and pent up, not least of all because a devastating wildfire is introduced in the first paragraph. Was there a reason you chose 1993, and how do you see that time as emblematic in any way of the city of Los Angeles?
KM: I was sixteen when that fire burned through Topanga, so 1993 was a time in my life I wanted to excavate. And it was an indelible time for California: yes, one year after the LA riots and one year before the passage of Prop 187, which took away an immigrant’s right to an education and healthcare. The uneasiness in the air was pervasive, well before the Santa Anas even started blowing. Later, Prop 187 was overturned and deemed unconstitutional, but [former governor] Pete Wilson’s policies and his fear mongering ahead of the 1994 election were a pretty clear influence on a young Stephen Miller, who was growing up in Southern California then. And I, as a pretty lost, queer teenager, felt the chaos and dysfunction of that time throughout my relationships. But as I wrote Kept Animals I knew my personal experience was merely a reverberation of a larger, cultural moment. I felt obligated to try and capture some if not all of that.
Kate Milliken (@KateDMilliken) is the author of the 2013 Iowa Short Fiction Award-winning collection of stories, If I’d Known You Were Coming. A graduate of the Bennington College Writing Seminars, she has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop and her short stories have appeared in Fiction, Zyzzyva, Santa Monica Review, and New Orleans Review, among others. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, anthologized in the California Prose Directory, New Writing from the Golden State, and received runner-up for the Rick DeMarinis award as well as the Dana Award for the Novel. Kate grew up riding horses in Topanga Canyon, California, in the early 1990s and it was to that time and those dusty trails that she returned as inspiration for her debut novel, Kept Animals. Praised by Janet Fitch in the New York Times Book Review and named by O. Magazine as an LGBTQ novel that will change the literary landscape, Kept Animals is a multigenerational story of friends and lovers, mothers and daughters, and a tragic accident that forever changes the lives of three very different families. Kate now lives in Northern California where she teaches privately and works as a developmental editor.
Elizabeth Gonzalez James' (@unefemmejames) stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares Blog, The Idaho Review, The Rumpus and elsewhere, and have received multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. Her debut novel, MONA AT SEA, was a finalist in the 2019 SFWP Literary Awards judged by Carmen Maria Machado, and is forthcoming, Summer 2021, from Santa Fe Writers Project. Originally from South Texas, Elizabeth now lives with her family in Oakland, California. Learn more at elizabethgonzalezjames.com.