19 Rounds with Katie M. Flynn
We were (and still are!) overjoyed that Katie M. Flynn joined the FAM as Fiction Editor this summer. Here, she goes 19 Rounds:
1. Early bird or night owl?
Early bird
2. What was your worst haircut?
I had a perm once in the 80s, sort of short and mushroom-shaped.
3. If you could only listen to one song for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Well, that would be terrible, but if I had to choose, it’d be something from Mozart’s Requiem. Maybe Kyrie? No, Rex tremendae. Technically, it’s a mass in movements. Can I have the whole thing?
4. Can you roll your tongue?
Oh yeah
5. Mayonnaise: yes or no?
Veganese!
6. What is your least favorite word to come across when reading a book or story?
grimace
7. Which movie was better than the book?
Never
8. What was your first concert?
Neil Young
9. It's Friday night. You're home alone. What did you order for dinner and what's on the TV?
I have small kids, so I’m never alone. Friday nights are for pizza and Inspector Gadget.
10. How do you take your coffee?
With cream (of the soy variety when I can get it)
11. What expression do you use that most people have never heard?
Words at night are feral things. (Stole that one from Joy Williams.)
12. What movie have you seen the most times?
I don’t rewatch too many movies these days, but as a kid, I was partial to the excellent dystopian film Solarbabies, involving roller skates and a glowing orb named Bohdai, and that caveman movie starring Ringo Starr.
13. What is the best thing you cook or bake?
My kids would say my chocolate chip cookies.
14. Finish this sentence: More people should be reading _______________.
Made for Love by Alissa Nutting, Hunger by Roxane Gay, and A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin because these are my three favorite summer reads thus far.
15. Favorite time-waster?
Online chess
16. What's the hardest thing about writing?
Patience
17. What's the best thing about writing?
Breakthroughs
18. What is your favorite sentence from a short story or poem?
Amy Hempel’s very short story, “Housewife”: “She would always sleep with her husband and with another man in the course of the same day, and then the rest of the day, for whatever was left to her of that day, she would exploit by incanting, ‘French film, French film.’”
19. What question were you hoping to be asked?
When was the last time you engaged in a Wiccan ritual? (last weekend)*
*as of earlier this summer.
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For more about Katie, check out her Twitter, website, and some of her recent work in Heavy Feather Review and Joyland. And don't forget to check out her Nelligan Prize-winning story in the Fall/Winter issue of the Colorado Review!