Shoutout Q&A with Paige Kaptuch
Author of “Ancestral Milk” in The Rumpus Magazine
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 June: an appreciation of Paige Kaptuch’s great, great grandmother of a story “Ancestral Milk” (5,300 words) in The Rumpus Magazine. I strongly recommend reading this amazing piece (via the link above), if you haven’t already, before reading this interview.
Other fiction from Paige has appeared in The Forge, Swamp Pink, Epiphany, Door Is a Jar, Master’s Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review and others. Paige is based in Western Colorado. She has an MFA in fiction from the University of Arizona and was named a 2025 Tennessee Williams Scholar in Fiction at the Sewanee Writers Conference, among other recognition. She’s at work on two novels!
Thanks for your time today, Paige. Your story “Ancestral Milk” really knocked me sideways. I’m fascinated by that amazing opening sequence (don’t want to spoil it, so I’m asking for any non-readers of Paige’s story to become readers now via the link above.)
Did you plan from the start to not clue readers in to the fact that your characters are living in a historical re-enactment of the western settler migration to Utah in the 19th century?
I’m imagining frustrating early drafts where you might have tried to set that scene from the outset versus letting it play out as you ultimately did, so it’d slowly become apparent to readers...
Thank you, Frank. I wrote this story in sort of a fever dream but I knew I wanted it to start in the tent, and I wanted the reader to feel just as jarred as Zoe [the main character] in the sense that she knows she’s participating in a reenactment, yet not fully grasping what this actually means—especially through the lens that this is a trip put on by adults for teens from a church she doesn’t belong to. There’s the power dynamic of knowledge at play too, and I think I wanted an outsider feel for the reader to line up with Zoe in this unfamiliar situation.
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In “Ancestral Milk,” you give us two great characters in Zoe (a new mom in a marriage that’s on the rocks, trying to find her way in a new part of the country) and Susan (an older woman and mother who I’ve described as representing everything that seems to operate effortlessly in the world.)
They feel like opposites in so many ways, but there’s obviously a deep kinship between them that’s only divided by age and experience. Can you tell us how both those characters evolved through the writing to become who they are in the published version?
I wanted Zoe to be seeking solace in some kind of alternate mother figure after losing her own mom, but I also wanted to expose that vulnerability and naivete when we lose someone close to us and how it may open us up to new people through a different lens. There’s a cruelty and power dynamic there that I’m interested in.
Another starting point in the development of this story is my endless fascination with genealogy research culture. In the LDS church, genealogy is deeply important and, in my experience, many folks take the research and discovery quite seriously (hence distant cousins through a polygamous marriage from over 100 years ago might connect and become treated as intimately as present day family members.)
You write both fiction and non-fiction [Paige’s “This Is Not an Escape Story,” published in Runner’s World, was a Longread’s “Top Five.”] If you could only write one or the other, which do you think you’d choose and why?
Fiction—hands down. I am most interested in writing stories where the art and craft can offer different interpretations and serve as a form of emotional truth telling. I do love researching and interviewing and when a non-fiction story really grabs me, I pursue it and it often informs my fiction down the line.
The Runner’s World feature was a labor of love and definitely driven by my interest in family history that permeates through much of my fiction and other work. Lately I’ve been focusing on the novel so I haven’t been pitching much else!
As a successful short-form writer, I’m certain you’ve been asked to talk about your novel manuscript-in-progress. I have to imagine that forces you to come up with an “elevator pitch”…which is a defacto summary.
That’s a lot of pressure! Especially if you’re a “pantser” (that is, writing by the seat-of-one’s-pants) and not an outliner. How are you contending with that? And anything you can tell us about the story would be great :)
I have two novels going right now—for fans of “Ancestral Milk:” what happens when Zoe wakes up halfway through the trip and her baby Pippa and everyone else...is gone? This is a manuscript in progress but it’s been fun to develop!
The other novel, Outdoor Influencers, I’m querying right now:
Set among the desert petroglyphs and secret slot canyons of Utah’s remote San Rafael Swell wilderness, Outdoor Influencers tells the story of what happens when a Mormon fundamentalist trying to save her pregnant daughters becomes entangled with two van life runfluencers who unwittingly aid her rescue efforts with their own exploitive motives for fame through storytelling.
Wow, that sounds great! For those not in-the-know, a runfluencer is a social media content creator who focuses on running, documenting their training, sharing workout tips, and promoting running gear or a fitness lifestyle online.
Can you shoutout a fellow writer / story / book that you think the world needs to have its eyes on now?
This shoutout is relevant to this story: I read Julie Orringer’s short story “Pilgrims” which I encountered years ago in 2001 in the Best New American Voices anthology edited by Tobias Wolf. The story stayed with me for years and I taught it later in my classes when it came out in her debut collection How to Breathe Underwater.
It is a story about children losing their mother, and at the time I didn’t have anything to grieve but I felt so connected to this story. Then, while teaching the story later on, my own Mom was losing her battle with cancer, and I felt even more connected and inspired to write, even though I couldn’t write fiction for almost a decade after losing her.
I just saw that Julie Orringer has a new novel coming out, Luna, Phoenix, Queen, so this seems timely to mention! I also want to shout out my Sewanee Writers Workshop classmates Pallavi Wakharkar and her debut novel, Housesitting, coming out this spring from Flatiron Books, as well as Blue Guldal and their booklet “Where the Cat Lives.” coming out in March from RADIX Publishing (small indie press in Brooklyn!)
What draws you to the short story form? And do you think that’s something you’ll keep pursuing?
I have always, always treasured short stories since I was a kid. In high school in the 90s, in a very cold patriarchal high school environment, I discovered Lorrie Moore‘s Self Help--a battered copy I still carry around as well as Pam Houston’s Cowboys are my Weakness. There’s something soothing to me about a story so contained. I’m not sure how else to explain it!
I had the pleasure of attending a writing retreat on Kaua’i with Pam—she’s a force of nature :)
Thanks so much for your time and attention, Paige!
Of course! Thank you Frank!
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