An Interview with Katie Kitamura

Katie Kitamura is the author of four books of fiction. Her most recent novel Intimacies is one of The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021 and one of Barack Obama’s favorite Books of 2021. It was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Katie teaches in the MFA program at NYU where she was a mentor to Erin Connal whose story, “Red Tide,” is included in this issue of Northwest Review. Erin’s first published short story “The Black Kite and the Wind,” was recently published in Virginia Quarterly Review and subsequently won a 2022 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize. The two writers caught up on a Tuesday in March and talked about the projects that they are working on, their family lives, the complexity of travel in 2022 (Katie for book tours, Erin to visit family in Australia), art, ballet and Erin’s deep regret of not having worked with Katie on her novel.

Northwest Review (NWR)

One thing, aside from fiction, that we have in common is an interest in contemporary art, or visual art in general. I heard you mention on a podcast that you are working on a project with the Stockholm based artists Goldin+Senneby, which I got really excited about. Can you tell me more about it?

Katie Kitamura (KK)

The role of ‘the author’ never sat that comfortably with me. I’ve always been interested in finding a way of working where I could challenge conventional ideas of authorship, and open up my practice in some way. The project with Goldin+Senneby is a collaborative novel. I had written some small pieces for them that were in response to a scenario or an artwork and a couple of years ago they asked if I would be interested in working on a novel with them.

First, Goldin+Senneby assembled an initial constellation of ideas, which in the case of this particular project are: autoimmunity, climate change, genetic modification, multiple sclerosis, specifically, because one of the artists has MS, notions of care, the pharmaceutical industry. That’s the constellation of ideas that we have been reading about and thinking about quite a lot.

Then, the novel itself is written like a relay race. They perform an action of some kind. For the first one they sent me a genetically modified pine tree from the University of Florida. Then, I try to make a piece of fiction out of that. In the case of the tree, I wrote maybe two chapters about the event of this arrival of the mysterious tree and I sent it to them. Then they come up with something else, an action or an idea, and then I write another couple chapters, and so on and so forth. And the hope is that the novel gets written in that way.

NWR

So the prose is all yours?

KK

The prose is all mine. In some ways you can kind of think about it as if you’re writing by prompt. Valeria Luiselli wrote a novel, The Story of My Teeth, which was originally a commissioned piece by the Galeria Jumex in Mexico. I think the way it worked was that she would write a chapter, she would send it to the factory workers at the Jumex juice factory, (which is where all of the money for this art collection comes from), and then they would give her feedback and she would write in response to the feedback so it was a kind of collaborative practice. It’s not dissimilar to that.

NWR

So, will it be necessary to know what actions were the catalysts for the prose in the case of your novel?

KK

It shouldn’t be. That’s the interesting test. I think it could completely not work which is fine with me. Part of writing is being willing to come against that kind of failure. Ideally though, I think it should work as a stand-alone book and you should later discover these other events, performances, installations. There have been chapters of the book that have been performed and have already been circulated. So, it has another life, but ideally it should be coherent as a book in and of itself. NWR

Are you still caring for the tree? Is it alive? Thriving?

KK

My care has been extremely poor, which I think will have to be integrated into the book. I have whatever you would call the opposite of a green thumb so the tree is currently dying in the corner of my office. I have been reading so many books about trees and communication and community and apparently trees in isolation are much more likely to die. When trees are planted with other trees there is a network of resource sharing that takes place. So, I have a potted tree that is dying in the corner of my office, and I can start to create narrative using these ideas of isolation and community. It’s been interesting. It’s a different way of creating story and a different way of finding your set of concerns in the fiction.

NWR

I have heard you say before that working on a documentary series with the philosopher Slavoj Žižek in your twenties was formative in your education as a writer. That while you never did an MFA this period of your life and the work and research involved was a kind of study in storytelling. Can you talk a little more about that?

KK

We were looking at films through the lens of psychoanalysis. He would take psychanalytic concepts and illustrate and explore them through specific films and end up talking about narrative structure, about character, psychology, about relationships, all of these ways of thinking about story, setting, image making. That has really informed the way I think about fiction. I didn’t do an MFA, so the practice of putting theoretical concepts into practice - I would say my understanding of how you might do that was honed through my work on that series. Over a period of years that involved watching loads of films and reading loads of theory, and I can see those two things together in the fiction that I write. Slavoj was also really incredible about thinking about how images work, how images create meaning, how images resist meaning. And that can also be translated into fiction quite easily.

NWR

I often find that a singular image might be the thing that resonates with me most about a piece of writing. Or perhaps not resonates, but endures, long after I’ve read the story. Perhaps it has to do with my brain these days being more and more sieve-like, but images seem very important to me in other people’s fiction. And it’s not necessarily something that I think a writer can set out to achieve. It’s more in the reading, the reception of a piece of fiction. Do you think about that when you are writing? Is there a conscious effort to create imagery that will resonate?

KK

I think images can create rhythm for a piece of fiction. Delineating an image is also a way of telling the reader to slow down. To create a caesura in the work. I think I’m often thinking about imagery in those terms. A Separation was a much more image-based novel than Intimacies, my more recent book. With A Separation the landscape for that novel was very specific and strange and the writing had to be very image based for that reason. In Intimacies, there is a moment when the central character is on the beach and a series of memories is unlocked through a specific image, but on the whole I don’t think it as image heavy as A Separation. There is a more very direct analysis of paintings in one scene but it’s more about analysis. It’s not about the haunting image. I think that when images are really haunting it’s when they can’t be decoded and explained. Whereas I think that scene is entirely about decoding images.

NWR

In addition to having an interest in visual art, film and obviously literature, I know that as a young person you trained as a dancer. It’s something that I think I found out about you when I was reading The Longshot. As I read that book it just made so much sense to me. Not just the parallels of dance and movement and MMA but the narrative and prose itself in that book read like a sort of dance to me. Is there anything specific about your life as a dancer that you think informs your writing life?

KK

I think with fiction you’re always revealing yourself even when you’re not writing anything about yourself. Dance is about discipline in so many ways and for me writing is also about discipline. And it shows in my writing practice. I am someone who will write and then re-write and re-write until I have some kind of breakthrough. Which is not how a lot of my friends work. A lot of my friends will be able to write in just two or three drafts. Whereas I write a dozen drafts and keep working away at the same thing over and over again and I think that doggedness comes from dance training. The other thing I learned from doing ballet is that you can try really, really hard and you can still not be good enough. And that there’s just no correlation between effort and reaching the thing you’re aspiring to.

NWR

With your re-writing, is it a matter of knowing what you are trying to achieve on the page and honing your prose until you feel as if you’re getting closer? Or even better, achieving it? And if your inclination is to have several drafts of something, at what point do you feel that you are ready to share it with your first readers?

KK

Like you, I feel like I have a pretty full schedule and life and so I enjoy the time when I can write fiction. I let myself enjoy that space. I let myself make mistakes on the page. I let myself write in quite a messy way and I constantly remind myself that the stakes are very low. And then the editing process is about focusing the novel more and more. Hari and I have this thing that we repeat to each other when we’re editing: you’re not trying to make it good, you’re just trying to make it better. Because what is good? And then the moment you think you’re not making it better, or when I don’t know how to make it better, that’s when I share it with somebody.

NWR

As a writer starting out, I think it’s so key to have a partner or family or friends who are encouraging. Or at least, not discouraging. Even if they’re sometimes neutral. Because it’s going to take a long time. And it takes someone else believing in you. Because invariably, there are times where you stop believing in yourself. You need someone to say, keep doing it. I remember hearing a teacher talking about how the most talented or gifted writer in their MFA cohort, the one they were sure would succeed, never went on to write anything after graduating. You have to keep writing if you want to be a writer. But sometimes it’s just so hard.

KK

It’s not that talent is irrelevant, but it is really not the deciding factor. And for me that’s something I find difficult about teaching. I see writers who are incredibly gifted and for whatever reason are not able to make a book. I find that difficult, because you don’t know how to help them do that necessarily.

NWR

As the student in that scenario, I can tell you it’s so important. When I graduated, I had a meeting with my thesis advisor and he told me he believed in me. It meant so much. It still does. I just keep returning to that conversation whenever I have doubts.

KK

I have had that from other writers. When writers I respect tremendously have been kind to me about my work, that has been transformative. I think, well if they think I’m not completely terrible, then I can’t be completely terrible. I think the hardest thing about writing a novel is sustaining your faith over several years. Because it takes several years and you have to keep believing that you are making something you will be able to finish and that will be worth sharing with other people. And sometimes you’re wrong. There are things that I’ve had to throw away, that’s part of the process. But the hardest thing, is you have to take the risk, that gamble. And that is about believing in yourself or in your practice and your project. It’s hard to write through crippling doubt. That’s something you have to leave outside the door.

NWR

Maybe that’s something that’s easier to do if you have a routine that you can stick to. I read an interview where Haruki Murakami talked about how he writes a novel. It was this incredibly immersive, months-long ritual where he slept a certain number of hours, wrote a certain number of hours, ran a certain distance every day for months and months, creating a trance like state. It seems entirely incompatible with modern life, or at least modern female life, and I can barely imagine the freedom of doing something like that, but I can certainly imagine that the routineness of it would be incredibly helpful.

KK

You have to put in the time and hope that something happens. There’s this line that I love in the new Hervé Le Tellier novel The Anomaly. The character who is a kind of failed writer says: It would only take the miracle of him writing a sentence that was more intelligent than he was, for him to become a writer. And I think that’s it. That’s why you keep doing it. You hope that something is going to happen in that space of you sitting down and starting to write, something that surpasses your conscious ability. If you’re just writing things that you know you can write that’s one thing, but you’re always hoping that that little miracle might happen. That you do something that’s beyond what you know or believe you are able to do.

NWR

I don’t think that’s happened yet for me.

KK

But that’s what you’re hoping to do! That’s what keeps you going and engaged.