Interview with Kellie Wells - An Update

Kellie was kind enough to answer some follow-up questions as the earlier posted interview is nearly 4 years old now. 

Dan:
 
When you published Compression Scars as a story within your collection, did you know at that time it was part of a larger work?
 
Kellie:
 
I didn’t write the story thinking I was going to expand it into something longer, but I’d started to work on the novel by the time the collection came out. I had this vague and shapeless desire to try to represent a community consciousness, and those characters seemed useful for that purpose. And Nancy Zafris also suggested to me that there was more to that story than the story.

Dan:
 
Your essay you shared yesterday about Stanley Elkin was very interesting in terms of getting a feel for the type of writing you enjoy both reading and writing.  What other authors really grab your attention?
 
Kellie:
 
Well, of course, there is an endless list, and I mentioned a few books I love at the end of the original interview. Lately I’ve been returning to Bruno Schulz, Robert Walser, Djuna Barnes, Angela Carter, Joy Williams, Jaimy Gordon, Kathryn Davis—they’re staples of my reading diet—and recently I’ve read and admired fiction by Kevin Brockmeier, Antoine Volodine, Kate Bernheimer, Natasza Goerke, Judy Doenges, Brian Evenson, Michael Martone, Etgar Keret, Rikki Ducornet, Neela Vaswani, Kelly Link, Eric Chevillard...
 
Dan:
 
A great portion of your life has been spent located in the Midwest - growing up there, graduate degree at Western Michigan, teaching in St. Louis.  Some of the conversation that's occurred at the LBC so far this week has referred to you as a Midwestern writer (and Skin was published in the U-Nebraska Press' Flyover Fiction Series).  However, you've also lived in the south and outside of the country at times.  Do you see any effects from living in these non-Midwestern locales in your writing at all?
 
Kellie:

I want to say something about the word “Midwestern,” which is that it’s freighted. It sometimes gets used pejoratively, dismissively, depending on who’s wielding it and why. And it’s reductive of course, as such terms generally are. It collapses together parts of this country that are more varied than the term would suggest. Having said that, it’s not a label I feel compelled to disavow, because clearly that freight is something that interests me.
 
As for the effects of living outside the Midwest, I find it easier to write about a place when I’m somewhere else; it just throws things into relief.

I’m really interested in mystical and occult movements of the nineteenth century, particularly as they intersect with the medicine of the day, so Rudolf Steiner, founder of the Waldorf Schools and anthroposophy, is someone I’ve long wanted to write about, and through him I hope one day to make use in my fiction of my time in Berlin. 

Dan:
 
Where in the world did you get the idea of including Prairie Dogs in Skin?
 
Kellie:
 
Ha. If you travel across the Great Plains states by car, you’ll likely pass a prairie dog town or two. They make an impression.

Dan:
 
I know from past discussions with you, and from reading your website, that you are at some stage of work on your second novel, FAT GIRL, TERRESTRIAL.  How is that coming along?  And, can fans of your short fiction expect to see any more short stories anytime soon, or have you decided to concentrate on the novel only these days?
 
Kellie:

The novel’s coming along, thanks for asking. I’m more a writer of sentences and paragraphs than chapters—that’s sort of my unit of composition—so I progress snailishly. I love the breadth the novel affords; it allows me to indulge (overindulge Joachim, my husband, would say) my natural tendency toward diffusion. But I also still quite like the form of short fiction, and when I get stalled with the novel, I stop and write a story. The stories I’m inclined to write now, however, in the middle of writing a novel, are fairly short. I’m thinking I’d like to teach a craft class on the 5-7 page story. It’s too long to be considered a bona fide short-short, is not so distilled, but at that length there’s still some compression going on.

Dan:
 
Thanks for the update Kellie!
 
Kellie:
 
Thank you, Dan!

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