Stretching the Space of Realism: An Interview with Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer is the author of the novels All The Broken Things, Perfecting, and The Nettle Spinner, as well as the short story collection Way Up. Kathryn’s short fiction has been published in Granta Magazine, The Walrus, and Storyville. She is the recipient of The Sidney Prize.

Interviewer’s Note: “I’ve been thinking a lot about what the writer can make believable,” Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer tells me, tucked away from the morning drizzle in a small High Park café, where we discuss her emotionally lush and energized third novel, All The Broken Things.

Garnering a host of acclaim since its release in January, the novel is premised on two unlikely intersections: the spectacle of bear-wrestling, and a painful truth about Canada’s past—that Agent Orange was manufactured in the small town of Elmira, Ontario. The protagonist is Bo: a 14-year-old Vietnamese refugee in Toronto, an outsider who fights to find himself. Soon, he is a bear-wrestler in the carnival circuit, where he forges a fierce friendship with the bear he trains. His sister Orange, disabled at birth due to exposure to Agent Orange toxins, struggles to define herself as something new, to break out beyond her mother’s shame.

The following interview was conducted on April 8, 2014 at Café Novo in Toronto.

 Nicole Grimaldi: Kathryn, I was searching the library catalogue for your new novel, All the Broken Things. I chuckled to myself when I read the subject titles it was indexed under. I’ll read them for you.

“Subject: Agent Orange fiction. Animal trainers fiction. Brothers and sisters fiction. Disfigured persons fiction. Families fiction. Human-Animal relationships fiction. Sideshows fiction. Vietnamese-Canada fiction.”

I’m wondering about the process before these handles get attributed. Do stories come to you slowly, gradually, begun with an image or a scene, and then evolve? When you read at the Pivot Reading on March 12, you mentioned that before the book was a fully formed thought, it was a scene where a boy would fight a bear. Is each project different? I was hoping you could tell us more about the genesis of All The Broken Things, before the subject titles became attached.

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer: The whole marketing thing is interesting. You’re working with widgets, words, trying to make life out of them. There’s a story, but there’s also what isn’t captured by the actual words. You try to put words together to say something about the excess that isn’t enclosed by them, whatever it is that the jammed-together words are trying to energize. But the words are the secondary thing. The first thing is the idea, or the little seed, the germ, the protoplasm.

I came across an article as I was editing Perfecting, my last novel. The article was about a man who claimed to have bear-wrestled at a county fair. I was blown away by it. I have a fascination with bears. I’ve encountered bears while tree-planting, and they are incredible creatures. Really scary, iconic, and pliable in the human imagination. I thought, “I’m going to write a bear wrestling story. I’m not going to spend ten years writing a novel again; I’m going to spend a couple of fun, rompy years writing a bear-wrestling novel which will require almost no research and will just be very fun to write.” But it wasn’t enough; it didn’t hold enough energy for me to make it work, and yet, it wasn’t going away. Like you suggest, it has something to do with the longevity of that protoplasm. Is it going to breed? Is it going to make something more of itself? It was a great visual, this idea of a boy wrestling a bear. But it didn’t measure into a novel, it didn’t really even measure into a story. There was no torque around it.

Later, I came across the Agent Orange Wikipedia page and there was a tiny footnote saying that Agent Orange was manufactured in Elmira, Ontario under contract to the US military during the Vietnam War era. I was born in ’65 and had grown up under the assumption that Canada hadn’t been involved in the Vietnam War. I was really upset; it gutted me to read that. It depressed me for days. I think I started to investigate more, and eventually started looking at images of children affected by Agent Orange, which is a devastating practice if you take it up. And then this character, Orange, just manifested. And then I thought, “Okay, I’m writing an Agent Orange novel, I’m not going to write a bear-wrestling novel.”

Swimming in my friend’s lake at a cottage north of Kingston, it occurred to me that the two ideas were the same novel. But I didn’t know how—I thought it was madness; how could these two things go together? And Bo, the boy, the bear-wrestler, shifted from a white Canadian kid to a Vietnamese immigrant, because I felt like I needed an Agent Orange child in the book. The story was initially written in first person from the point of view of Orange as a kind of epistolary novel. It didn’t work for a number of reasons. But writing it was a great exercise; I really got to know her character and develop the tempo and parataxis of the novel. With ATBT, the writing process was kind of uncanny. I just let the story be told in the first draft, I had faith in it.

NG: I know you, first and foremost, as a peer. You are currently earning your PhD in English Literature at the University of Toronto. How does the academic side of your life inform your creative side? How do the two come into conversation?

KK: I’ve only really gone back to school in the last few years, so the specific work that I’m doing at school can only really have informed ATBT. I just thought it would be interesting if academics and writers were more connected. That was a motivating force for me, to some extent, to go back to school—to investigate that. Before that I was in the world, obviously, researching. Not so much in a scholarly way, but researching toward story-building, which is a bit of a different operation.

There are so many reasons for going back to school, but one of my reasons was to gather knowledge with access to resources I wouldn’t normally have.

Interestingly I’m finding that those areas are helping me to think more clearly about the way I’m building my work. I now find that the process of creative production involves not thinking, but instead applying knowledge you already have into the writing. If you’re hyper-intellectualizing your work as you are writing it, it won’t feel organic. The emotional palette won’t be as alive or accessible, in a sense. I try to turn off my head a bit when I’m writing. Otherwise, one starts writing texts that are heavily footnoted—there’s a cheekiness to that kind of marginalia, but it doesn’t always let the reader become immersed. I can enjoy that kind of text too, but it’s a different experience.

With ATBT, I came to a particular impasse where I knew the scene I was headed toward, but I couldn’t figure out how to get there, how to write it. So I stopped writing for weeks. I was hitting my head against a wall, thinking, “How am I going to get there?” I had a cup of tea with my friend. I was telling her the same story and she said, “Well, why don’t you just write the scene that you know?” And I thought, “Wow. That just might work.” And of course, it did. As soon as you write the scene you know, you’re enunciating something. And by enunciating it, you start to see how you have to get there. So I just started writing cluster scenes around that scene and eventually it linked up with what I was working on.

“If you’re hyper-intellectualizing your work as you are writing it, it won’t feel organic.”

I think it is useful to think about writing as a chain of scenes, rather than as a complete piece, at least during the composition stage. That’s something I tell my students. At some point, you have to think about it as a complete piece, but when you’re writing, you can think of it like beads on a chain. You’re writing all these beads and eventually you figure out how to link them together. Rather than clenching down and being determined that you’re going to write it all in order, just give over to whatever comes. So it isn’t always about thinking it through. Sometimes you just have to do it. You might go down a wrong trail once in a while, but what’s the harm in that? You will still have explored something. The work should feel like you’re open to it.

NG: Recently, I have been studying the Canadian poet Don McKay. He writes poetry, in part, as an attempt to engage in and translate the experiences that “elude the mind’s appropriations.” Interestingly, he calls this capacity “wilderness,” but says it is everywhere beyond the domesticated space of “home.” It stands outside the familiar. It is never completely knowable or nameable, but he believes the artist’s task is to engage with this incommunicable power alive in the world.

I think this notion of “wilderness” is comparable to the Lacanian Real, or Deleuzean desire—concepts explored in psychoanalytic theory. I know that you study psychoanalysis. Do you find philosophers/psychoanalysts instructive in elucidating some of your own creative concerns? Do they help you to articulate your procedures as an artist?

KK: I’ve found psychoanalysis hugely helpful in articulating what it is that I’m doing and how to think about the marginal—what writers do, what our position is. I think it’s Horkheimer and Adorno who talk about how there is no space in civilization for the writer—that we are sort of outside the economy, not inscribed.

“To be outside is to be in a space of madness, but that space allows you to see more clearly what’s happening inside.”

And I think that’s actually a good thing. But by putting us outside, it also puts us in the space of madness. If we’re not in, then we have to be outside looking in, and commenting on the inside. It’s a difficult position because we never feel completely accepted. But it lets us observe and engage in ways that don’t register as confrontational because we’re acting from a different space. I can observe things, or say things, or think things. I can theorize and build up a story with less interference.

Lewis Hyde wrote a book called The Gift, in which he talks about how a writer’s reciprocity is about legacy and acknowledging previous writers. He says a gift is always an excess, and returning the excess is an impossibility. Blanchot talks about this as a sort of nullity, and a sort of madness. To be outside is to be in a space of madness, but that space allows you to see more clearly what’s happening inside. I don’t want to give the impression when I say “an outside space” that I mean a sort of privileged space. I don’t think it is. I think everyone has the experience of not feeling hinged to civilization. It is probably a very common experience. If you’re not completely mad, you are of course still hinged to society in some way (writers included). But I feel like many writers toggle in and out, or they’ve practiced toggling in and out. When you’re outside, you still need to communicate with what is inside. Because the real economy and what you actually need to survive are on the inside, too.

NG: I’ve wondered whether the mad writer can still survive in today’s economy. Some of the greatest writers in history have arguably been insane. Today, it seems that we demand from fiction writers a kind of care, attentiveness, a well-researched practice. We anticipate that they will be producing from a safe place.

I was listening to a podcast recently arguing that there is no longer space anymore for the drunk Hemingways of the world. Now, writers are fathers and mothers and often manage other responsibilities and jobs on the side, or have enjoyed enough privilege to become well-educated and to take up writing. What has changed?

KK: It’s a good question. I think it was Russell Smith who wrote an article years ago saying that you’re more likely to see Canada’s writers jogging than drinking in a bar. We have kind of switched our sublimation, I guess. But I feel like most literary writers would still admit to feeling unhinged at least part of the time, especially when writing. What might be different now is the mystique and celebrity that surrounds writing, and what is expected of a writer once they have been published.

NG: Something you’ve said that has stuck with me, was that writing a book is akin to “doing a shit.” In that there is a build-up in the writer of questions and concerns, which need to compress somehow and then be expelled. When you complete a book, is it ever truly finished? Is it something you feel compelled to revisit, or do you flush it and move on?

KK: Every writer I’ve ever talked to has responded to this—they’ve either had shitting dreams, or puking dreams, in which they are creating something shameful.

So, you never can flush it. Freud talks about the moment of rejection, shitting as both a pleasurable and a painful experience, and also a deeply creative experience that has been repressed and made painful through toilet training and that sort of thing. So it seems natural that a writer would feel a pretty profound element of shame in this moment of creation. I started to think about shame as something that was productive. In a sense, if you’re feeling shame for something, you’re also creating something and being made to feel vulnerable because of it. When you write and publish, people are watching you shit. Hopefully the shit is—nice.

I do move on, and I don’t move on. I move on because I want to make another dung-heap. Usually, what happens is that by the time I finish one book and it’s coming to press, I’m working on another one. There is nostalgia for the book that is coming out, and it is a weird situation. Because you’ve made this thing even while you’re already busy on the next thing. You’ve evolved. The media around a text is a strange thing for a writer because nine times out of ten they are already off doing something else. So your head is elsewhere but you have to honour what you’ve made.

“So, you never can flush it.”

Nostalgia has within it the beginning of a new thing. If you’re looking back, it means there must be a future, too. There’s a kind of iterative aspect to writing. You finish one project, you start another. The person asking you about the text is interested in something you have started to put behind you. It’s an awkward operation.

NG: The fantastic elements in your work dazzle and perplex the realist quotidian. Why did it become important for you to invoke these features, and do they free up spaces for exploration that might not otherwise be available within a strictly realist style?

KK: I’m trying to think of when it all started. There was a decisive shift to not worry about it being realist. The market is changing, for sure. But I feel there is a large part of the market that prefers realist texts, that prefers texts to be defined as mimetic, representational, and tangibly real. It has always been a bit of a problem for me. Even Way Up (2003), my first book, is closer to realism than anything else I’ve written, but the surrealist elements are amplified in ways that can’t be entirely real. In the last few years, I’ve been writing stories and this novel, which are emphatically unrealistic, in spite of the fact that a lot of the media around this book has felt inclined to call it realist. “Realist” and “enchanted,” sometimes in the same review, which I find kind of astounding. Well, which is it? Maybe there is now an opening in the universe for realism and enchantment to happen that there wasn’t before.

There is a huge amount of possibility when you start to stretch realism, and the stretching of realism is mimetic, in a sense, because we don’t just live in realistic terms, we live in our heads. We imagine narratives for other people. We see things on the subway and begin to tell stories about it. And none of it’s real. And all of it’s real. I started to think of realism as an expanding rubber band that I could push at the edges of and see what I could still make believable. That has been the play for me. Maybe there’s an operation that the writer can perform to shift the allowable space for belief in the reader. What if we believed more? What would the world look like?

NG: On your website, you have a quotation by Lewis Hyde prefacing the links to your own work: “To whom does the artist address the work?” And in your recent interview with [Puritan reader] Shawn Syms of The Winnipeg Review, you said: “You’re never really writing for yourself; anybody who’s writing seriously is always to an extent anticipating response in a shrinking market.”

You have dedicated each of your books to either your sons and/or your husband. To whom does the writer address the work? How is dedication different from address? Does the target of a writer’s address change?

KK: I think every book is addressed to a different kind of person, and that person is always a projection of who you are, in a way. I just wrote an essay about this. I theorize that the writer is a kind of local psychotic. A writer dissolves into the text and into a space of linguistic disarray in a first draft, to create something that is also a kind of world. But that world is temporary, in contrast to a fully mad person’s. The more I investigate it, the more I feel that the one thing hinging the writer to civilization is the fact that the writer wants to be read. So the writer works in private, and that space can feel as though it’s in in disarray, or like madness.

Mavis Gallant said: “I still do not know what impels anyone sound of mind to leave dry land and spend a lifetime describing people who do not exist.” And there is a kind of madness there; the operation of wanting to do that is kind of peculiar. But knowing throughout the process that we want to be read and actually writing it for someone keeps us holding on, at least by a thin thread, to the non-mad, to the world. I think that it is important that writers keep that thread and that they remember that people are reading their work, and that there’s an appetite for it. I feel every single book of mine has been written with one or two people in mind—for, or against.

“... there is a large part of the market that prefers realist texts, that prefers texts to be defined as mimetic, representational, and tangibly real.”

Still, I kept ATBT pretty close to myself. With Perfecting, I was sending it to someone. I felt I needed someone to witness it as pieces of it were being written. With The Nettle Spinner, I had a friend I would call. I read pieces of it to her aloud. She’s a storyteller, her name’s Dawne McFarlane. She receives things with more clarity when spoken. So with each book, the process has been different.

NG: I like that you talk about the reader as a kind of projection of yourself. Perhaps when you write and if the work is resonating for you, you inevitably anticipate that your reader will also be the kind of person for whom it resonates. There is kind of a kinship with the unseen reader.

KK: Along that same thought-train, all the characters in a book are also projections or aspects of yourself. In a way you can’t escape it—you’re always in some way writing about yourself, to yourself. You write this thing, and it disrupts or stretches the edges of signification. If it strikes something in the reader, they buy it, they finish it, they don’t throw it against a wall. And if they allow that, you can actually change, in tiny ways, what the signifying chain is in the first place. And you can have an effect on civilization.

NG: You talked about the reader “allowing” it. And maybe part of the question is to what degree that can continue once a book is closed. Whether it is restricted to the imaginary realm or whether it can carry into and inform our lives. I’m trying to think of novels that have completely ruptured our understanding of representation and reality, that have impacted the way in which we see the world, that have re-inscribed the conventional chain of signification—books that have reconfigured how things mean. I think it is still possible.

KK: I think it is still possible, too. I do. Canada Reads said the book they were looking for in 2013 was the one that was going to change Canada. That was their MO. So it’s interesting that it’s being sought.

NG: There is a sort of recognition that Canada needs something to rupture its placid persona. Everyone is so exhausted with the discussions around the nature of CanLit—what it is or isn’t, how it should or shouldn’t change. Everyone is exhausted. And yet it’s still a problem, still a question.

KK: Yes, and I think that’s a good thing. It means writers are doing what they should be doing. It shouldn’t be a question that’s containable, and as soon as it is, that’s a problem.

NG: What I love about your prose is the sprawl of your sentences—each one in All The Broken Things is sensual and visceral, particularly when it comes to smells (as in the story “Seal,” published last January in The Walrus, which takes place in and around a fish shop).

I often feel that you put as much care into your prose at the level of the line, its pulse and cadence, as you do into the narrative thrust and overarching progression of plot and character. How does a writer cultivate this sort of duality of attention? How does one arrest a reveling prose and place it in the service of the novel’s larger operations?

KK: It’s a good question. I’m not sure I have a really apt answer. It comes back to what we were talking about earlier, this sort of germ or protoplasm. I know I have a story when there is a pulsation, a sort of frisson of energy that is uncontainable, and I don’t yet know what it is, but if I have that, I feel there is a story and that I can sustain it. I feel like I need to be sustained long enough to tell it. It has to be exciting, so there’s an adrenal response to the moment when story becomes story for me. For ATBT, that happened when I realized the bear-wrestling and Agent Orange had to go together, because of the impossibility. I had to do it.

It was similar with “Seal,” a story published in The Walrus, about a little boy’s love for a fishmonger’s wife. It is a very enchanted story. It runs between the boy’s imagination and the real world. Hopefully, the reader stops caring which is which. That’s where it starts. The language, the flow of the sentences, is a byproduct of my energetic interests and my adrenaline, and of course practice. When I first started writing, I was very shy. I would write these 4-sentence stories. They were crystalline, but they weren’t really stories. They were conceptions of possible future stories. But they kind of had a shimmer to them. I was always practicing that style of writing, and eventually, that just becomes how you write.

NG: Your first title published by Goose Lane Editions was a book of short stories called Way Up (2003). Three full-length novels have followed this. Short story collections are difficult to sell these days. Do you have a theory about why readers prefer long fiction to short fiction? Do you think most readers want to become invested in a novel, to really escape into it? Does short fiction not have the time or space to accomplish this?

KK: Throughout the last three novels, I have continued to write and publish short stories. I have enough to put out another collection. I don’t really know what the problem is around the economy of short stories, because I feel like people do read them. It’s a pity that some of the bigger subscription magazines no longer have short fiction. Chatelaine used to. Toronto Life used to have a Summer issue. Part of the change has to do with advertising space and simply keeping afloat. Short story collections used to be a sort of CV entry for Canadian writers; they were meant to get you noticed by a bigger publisher who might publish your novel. That used to be the way the market worked. But the market has really changed. A lot of publishers, even small publishers, are not really interested in publishing short stories. And it’s not that they don’t love short stories; it’s just that they have a hard time marketing them.

In my day, the short story collection was kind of just a thing. You’d get all your short stories together and call it a collection. It was like an album. You would give it a title based on the title story. It could be a group of stories that didn’t necessarily have anything to do with one another. Around the time Way Up was published, publishers started wanting thematically-driven short story collections, which I think is just a testament to the way marketing departments work, how they feel they can make something palatable to the public. It’s a pity because it means writers are being constrained to write stories around, you know, tuberculosis in the eighteenth century. Or they are constrained by an object (like a hair hat or a verandah, in the case of Carrie Anne Snyder and Jonathan Bennett). There’s nothing the matter with that, if you happen to have a suite of stories that do that, but it is an arbitrary restraint that only really makes sense from a marketing standpoint. And even with these strategic constraints, the marketing fails. Short story collections are not being purchased.

“It’s hard to say what will happen with the next book, where the story will end up going. And I don’t really care.”

I think short stories are more difficult than novels, in a certain sense—more puzzling. They go at things skewed. They’re more like poems in their abstractions and in their sense of immersion in a character. Novels do another thing, by allowing the reader to really invest, as you say. They can live in another world for a period of time and that feels satisfying in a different way.

NG: I was speaking with a publisher recently who cringed at their own use of the term, but conceded that “of course, we have a brand of some sort.” It’s inevitable, especially with smaller presses, that the editors gravitate toward writing engaged with particular thematic concerns and that exhibit specific styles. A novel needs to find a space for its brand within a larger brand, in that sense. Once the project is complete, and the marketing factor enters in, how important does it become to brand your work in some way or another, to make it appetizing enough for a reader’s digestion?

KK: It’s a tough question, because there are so many elements at play. It can be something as simple as an editor who loves your work getting suddenly fired, which happens. With the early books, I was less savvy about these things. I just wanted to get the work published. I wanted a bigger publisher, a bigger readership. I had the notion that I could make a decent enough living at this thing, that I could justify it. And then I had a really big psychological shift, and I don’t think it’s feasible for me to write with those things in mind. So ATBT was written in spite of the market, and I didn’t really pay attention to whether or not it would sell. I thought it could, somewhere. I had a wonderful dream that I had gone into a publishing house and had been talking to my publisher, and she said, “It’s ready; it’s ready and it’s beautiful.” I asked to see it and she showed me the book, ATBT. It was clear in the dream that I had commissioned her to publish it, but I’d commissioned her to just make one copy. It was the most rejuvenating dream. For a while, I fantasized about enacting that dream, about getting it published as one book and just sharing it with people I liked.

NG: Your first three titles were published with Goose Lane Editions, a small independent press, and All The Broken Things was picked up by Random House. How did the marketing process shift for you from a small press to a larger house?

KK: I didn’t have clear expectations about what would happen to the book, so I was pleasantly surprised. There were two things I wanted, a wish-list for this book. One was that I would have a really good editor. The other was that the editor be stationed in Toronto. It’s not very convenient to have an editor in Fredericton. I didn’t meet my last editor until years after the book had been published. My editor, Amanda Betts, was at the Pivot Reading on March 12. That was an experience I’d never had before, that level of support. It’s lovely to have. So those were the two things I wanted and I got them in spades: Anne Collins and Amanda Betts edited the book together, and had a phenomenal eye on the text. There are fewer and fewer really astute senior editors around. The book is lucky, in that sense. It almost didn’t happen. It’s hard to say what will happen with the next book, where the story will end up going. And I don’t really care.

NG: I have a few more questions about ATBT. The most recent government statistic put Toronto’s immigrant population at over 46 percent. This novel delivers a lot of violence, trauma, and troubling Canadian history (with the production of Agent Orange happening in Elmira, Ontario during the Vietnam War) to the urban, local space of Toronto. How do you see Bo’s position as a Vietnamese refugee, as an outsider in many ways, speaking to the experience of real migrants living in Toronto, or Canada more broadly? To what degree does the novel wish to complicate the conception of Canada as a welcoming and live-and-let-live kind of space?

KK: As you were asking that question, I was thinking about every cab I’ve ever taken. Many of the drivers are immigrants to Canada. I’m really chatty, and I love to know the drivers’ stories. I always ask them what they did before they immigrated. They are often professionals who come to Canada and discover upon arriving here that they are not allowed, in some cases, to do what they were trained to do because they don’t have the right credentials, which I think must be quite devastating and frustrating.

What I was interested in doing with the novel, which attaches to this question, was figure the culpability by bringing an actual Agent Orange child into the geographical space of here. It was an extended project borne from some of the short stories I had been writing—to bring some of the anxieties of the world at large to the local geography of Toronto, in order to make it more amplified and less distant. It was very purposeful to bring Orange in, even though I don’t know for certain whether there have been Agent Orange children born in Canada. There are all kinds of medical problems with soldiers who trained at Gainesville, Florida, for instance. There was a class action suit that was won in 2007 and those American soldiers got compensation. Canadian soldiers exposed to Agent Orange have also received compensatory packages. But never have the Americans or the Canadians admitted to the egregious crime that was committed on Vietnam itself. They sprayed it as a defoliant, but certainly the chemical companies knew that their product was both carcinogenic and mutagenic. Now, Agent Orange is in its third generation of damage to innocent people. It’s a very sad history, and part of the challenge was to bring that history into the space of here while still making it palatable.

I was interested in writing a novel that was political, because I think that writing is a political act. Many writers will disagree with me, but I think, if writing isn’t a political act, then maybe writers shouldn’t be doing it. Or certainly, I shouldn’t be doing it. Even if that political act is a simple, tiny agitation that asks people to see things anew—that’s important to me. At the same time, I didn’t want it to only be a political novel. I wanted to tell a story; I wanted to create something.

NG: Upon reading the tiny footnote about Agent Orange and realizing that this fact wasn’t widely known, did you feel a sense of duty or responsibility to make the Canadian public aware?

KK: Definitely. And it’s interesting. I spent some time digesting it, being furious about it. And then I realized I had to write the novel differently than I had planned to write it. It had to be a novel with Vietnamese characters in it, about whom I knew nothing, and about whom I didn’t want to presume to know something. So the objective of the novel became how to be open-hearted. The question became: how can I allow myself to write from the perspective of a 14-year-old Vietnamese person? And one of the answers was that it was imperative that I did, because I felt that as a complicit Canadian, I (or we) had allowed it to happen. And this needed to be known.

NG: What is it like to write in an existing geographic space, like Toronto? Does it involve a relinquishing of the familiar? Does it involve finding the fictive elements alive in the familiar? Do your novels recast spaces, or do existing spaces invade your novels?

KK: I definitely think I recast and reimagine spaces, often in impossible ways. There’s a story I published in Granta Magazine that has as its driving premise a love affair wherein there is a power disparity—the boy is more in love with the girl than the girl is in love with him. The less she’s in love with him, the more he’s in love with her, and the more he’s in love with her, the more dogs that follow her. So as the story goes on, more and more dogs pursue her. They go down into the subway, and try to get into the YMCA on Dovercourt, where she works. And there’s another story, one that won a prize in the States and that I had published on an app called Storyville. It is set in the future, at a time when books are really dangerous to carry around because there aren’t many left and people want them. A lot of strange things start happening in High Park: people get murdered, there are bands of roving adolescents who are wild and feral. So the real spaces are reimagined.

With ATBT, I walked around the Junction a lot. And the places I mention, almost all of them, are real. Real and imagined. That is part of what is at play in my newer work, too, which involves mapping the city, mapping the space I live in. I’ve had feedback from readers saying that since they read ATBT, they are seeing bears. Not actually seeing bears, but they’re imagining the possibility of seeing bears walking through High Park. It’s lovely that that would translate. It’s what I wanted.