Shoutout Q&A with Kate Tooley
Author of “The Golden Apples of Little River, Alabama” in The Kenyon Review
Welcome back to our Friday feature: Shoutout Q&A.
Check out our archives for access to great short stories published across the last half-year-plus, including this posting from July: an appreciation of Kate Tooley’s fully engaging “The Golden Apples of Little River, Alabama” in The Kenyon Review.
Other work of Kate’s has appeared in Witness, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Passages North, Pithead Chapel and many others. Kate is a queer writer originally from the Atlanta area, now based in Brooklyn. They write about the sticky corners of gender and sexuality; complicated families; and the myriad ways in which we become haunted.
I’m such a big fan of “Golden Apples,” I hope you don’t mind that we start there. When I stumbled across it as part of my regular short story web scouring, I was immediately gripped, immediately entertained—and I mean that as the highest compliment. There are so many things that recommend it, but the biggest thing for me was getting the feeling that it was written with an audience in mind. It felt like you were taking your readers by the hand and saying come on along with me on this ride and let’s have some fun. Am I off base in assuming that was part of your mindset?
Well, that’s what all storytelling is, right – holding out your hand and asking someone to go with you? I guess sometimes you’re lurking in the woods saying “follow me if you dare,” but you know what I mean. I’m so glad you had fun with it and I love that it made you feel that way. I had read the first about three hundred words, back when I had no idea if it was going to be anything at all, to a big group at a writing residency. So many people came to find me after to ask what happened next. I do think I felt an obligation to make it good for them.
On top of that, I mostly write flash; I was terrified to try and write long short fiction, but also having a lot of fun trying to figure out how. What I did understand was that under this big, mythic premise were a bunch of deeply sad characters, and if I learned nothing else from growing up around old school oral storytelling, it’s easier to kick someone in the teeth if you’ve got them laughing first.
Your work has appeared across a wide range of publications, many of them—like The Kenyon Review—highly ranked and with very low acceptance rates. For the benefit of up-and-coming writers out there who aspire to those heights, what can you tell us about your post-acceptance experiences (editorial involvement, things you didn’t expect, maybe interest those publications have drummed up for you in the wider world)?
Everything varies: editorial, promotion, publication schedules, etc. With a journal like Kenyon, you get the privilege of working with top tier copy editors. (A thousand thanks to the brilliant Elizabeth Wagner who had to put up with one million “stet for regionalism” notes).
But I’ve also had wonderful editorial experiences at smaller magazines, and the times I’ve had agent interest or other stories being solicited because of a pub, it’s often been surprising which one. I’ll tell you my personal favorite. I had a little gay ghost story published online, and I’ll always be grateful to Passages North for this because they accepted three pieces for print, and I said, “hey, I really want this particular story to be accessible, would you consider it for online?” and they were so gracious about it. So I guess a little advice, ask for what you want.
Anyway, a couple of months later I got this email from a college professor who teaches at a school a few towns over from where I grew up. One of his students had found the ghost story online and presented it to the class for a project. I’ll be honest, I cried a little about it. It’s something about the way stories let us reach through time and space, become bigger than ourselves.
Hell, I’m choking up over here just hearing that story…
If you don’t mind sharing, how do you contend with the inevitable rejections that are part of the short story submission process? And because you’ve experienced the success you have, maybe you can let us know how your take on that subject has changed over time.
I am probably not the person for this question; before I started seriously writing, I worked in college and community theater where rejection is often real time, deeply personal, and deeply public.
By comparison magazine rejections feel very gentle, and I’ve gotten so many lovely little notes from editors over the years. I try to look at them as learning opportunities—sometimes it’s just not the time or the fit, other times it means a story isn’t there yet. And I’m so, so grateful to the editors who’ve rejected pieces I sent before they were ready and given me a chance to get them where they deserved to be.
Can you shoutout a fellow writer / story / book that you think the world needs to have its eyes on now?
Can I give you a few?
Story: Simo Srinivas and Sara S. Messenger just collaborated on a short piece in Diabolical Plots called “We Burst Across the Theoretical Gore” – if you loved This is How you Lose the Time War, go read this immediately.
Books: I read Emma Copley Eisenberg’s linked collection, Fat Swim, early in the summer and I loved it. Great, smart writing. It manages to be very visceral and very clever at the same time, which is an instant sell for me. Plus anything set in Philly wins in my book.
I’ll also shout out Crocodilopolis by my very dear Pisces friend John Manuel Arias. It just came out and I haven’t started it, but he’s a gorgeous writer at the line level and if you love a big family saga, myths revenge, all that good stuff, I don’t think you could go wrong.
Writers: Two writers I think everyone should have their eyes on right now are J. L. Akagi and Niv Sekar. Both have some wonderful short stories out and I can’t wait to see what comes next.
I really enjoyed your story “Bait Dog,” published in Pithead Chapel. From the first sentence, there’s an incredible propulsion behind it. It reads like a car racing downhill, spills out so effortlessly that it feels like you were taking dictation as much as writing it. What can you tell us about your process there?
Oh I’m tickled you enjoyed that one. Writing that story was a bit of an exorcism—I’m perpetually haunted by what it means to stay and what it means to leave, and I think this story was the first time I tried to write explicitly about that. I was thinking a lot about all the different flavors of power, what it means to stay somewhere when your very existence destabilizes power structures—do you lean into that or away from it?
I took a look at the first draft just now to check and the story has always had the same shape, largely the same beats, but I did do a lot of editing, largely to bring readers into the world of the story. Until I got early feedback, I hadn’t realized, for example, that a lot of people don’t know what a bait dog is. It meant I had to reframe or contextualize certain things for the story to work.
I think the pace you picked up on has more to do with the character—she’s been running pell-mell her whole life, just trying to survive and my hope was that the reader would be able to feel that as well as understand it intellectually. Once I understand the character I can usually find the rhythm, and once I’ve got that, I’m set. Everything else can figure itself out.
You’ve done some work with Stanchion Magazine in the past, including a soon-to-be-published flash piece (entitled “Nobody’s Gonna Make You Go to Pigeon Forge”) in their upcoming fall issue. As I understand it, there’s a longer story involving Dolly Parton in the works with them, too. What can you tell us about that? (Note: this questions was posed just prior to Dolly Parton’s passing.)
There is, and I can’t tell you how strange I feel about that right at the moment given we’ve lost Dolly. It’s taken me an incredibly long time to find a home for this story—it’s gone through a lot of iterations, and I was picky about where I wanted to send it because it’s very close to my heart. Until Golden Apples, it was the longest thing I’d written.
Dolly is special to people for a lot of different reasons, but what I learned from her is that if you can find a genuine, unflinching love and respect for who you are and where you come from (even if it’s a fraught, complicated place), you can keep from getting so twisted up. And that’s really what the story is about. I hope she’d approve.
Anything you can tell us about the Gothic novel you have in the works? Or at the very least, how you’re taking to the novel-writing-process versus the relatively quick-hit of generating short stories?
I love the novel writing process; I actually prefer it to short fiction because I like staying with a character over time. I’ve written a couple of novels before, one to see if I could and one for my MFA, but I really threw myself in the deep end with this one. I may have taken the “write what scares you” advice a little too much to heart.
On one hand it’s a novel about cults and secrets and small towns, on the other it’s about the soft edges of ourselves, where we bleed into the past and into each other and how that’s both beautiful and terrifying.
Thanks very much for your time, Kate. And please keep us posted when new work is about to hit so we can all be there for it :)
~*~
For more Kate Tooley, visit their website, where you can find links to both fiction and creative nonfiction works.
Thanks for reading Short Story Shoutout.
Check out our archives for more bracing, new short stories, more about the journals that publish them, and interviews with the writers who brought them to life.
And if you’re feeling it, please recommend us to your writer friends so we can bring more eyes to writers on the come up, weekly.
Comments