When I was a liminal fifteen in Reagan’s dire 1980s, my desperately-needed imaginative transport took the form of cable reruns of The Twilight Zone. Having been met at the departure terminal of the fantastic some years earlier by Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, I quickly discovered that Rod Serling’s “land of both shadow and substance” would be the friendly, if not quite harmless, spirit sitting next to me during continued flights of fancy, poking me in the ribs and assuring me, as it sloshed its bourbon in a plastic glass, that no matter how wise I may become life would always reserve for itself the privilege of mystery. No matter the stacks of philosophy, religion, and history I might feast upon in future, there would always be a dim dinner party just this side of the light that would only allow me to watch, never to join. One in which the guests laugh too loudly, though some quietly weep, and the courses served are made of sand set in a cracked hourglass.
Kate Folk’s first collection of stories, Out There, shuttles down the same side streets, as at home in the weird and potentially prophetic as any episode of Black Mirror. A Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University, Folk writes bleak, darkly comic stories, peopled by folks on edge, in straits that will grow more desperate over time, twilight zones to which these unwary must ultimately succumb. She has a debut novel on its way as well as a TV series based on two stories in this collection, one of which is the title story published by the New Yorker in March 2020. I had the opportunity to interview Kate Folk via Zoom at her home in San Francisco.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Ryan Asmussen
Two of the primary themes of this collection are: 1) the longing for connection, most prominent perhaps in the title story and its companion piece, “Big Sur,” and 2) the longing for escape, for isolation, as evidenced in “Shelter” and “Void Wife.” Polar opposites yet both intrinsic to our human condition.
Kate Folk
That’s great! I’m really fascinated with that kind of push-pull because in life both are often present at the same time. Wanting to be close to people, wanting intimacy, but also pushing away from it and wanting autonomy. I find that kind of conflict interesting. Actually, that was something I was thinking about when structuring the stories. There was a point where my editor and I had to decide the story order, and it was always going to the two “blot” stories, “Out There” and “Big Sur,” as bookends [Note: “Blots” are artificial men, AIs, created to swindle financial information from young women].
But, when I first submitted the book, the middle order was a little different. Eventually, I started thinking of the book as following a thematic trajectory from “seeking” to “finding.” So, now at the beginning I have characters who are searching for something, not finding it, then feeling frustrated and alienated. Then, “The Bone Ward,” the middle piece, is the nadir of that searching, of being annihilated by desire. After that, there’s more lightness in terms of characters finding what they’re looking for, even if it’s something like “Moist House,” where the guy finds a house that he enters into a weird codependent relationship with. Your interpretation does fit with what I was thinking of, that kind of back-and-forth duality.
Ryan Asmussen
You write tales dealing with houses that are, in some way, alive. Do you have any idea where these stories came from, imaginatively? In one story, the house terrorizes its inhabitants, and in the other the protagonist is actually seduced by his house. Interestingly, again, we have this dichotomy of theme. In another story, a man’s head begins to rise through the floor!
Kate Folk
It’s definitely a repeating theme. I think “The Head in the Floor” was inspired by my old apartment that I actually just moved out of last summer. It was a studio apartment in San Francisco I’d lived in for ten years. When you rent an apartment for that long, things start to become dilapidated, but I felt like I couldn’t really ask the company to repaint it or do other work on it because they’d be, like, ‘Why are you still here?” It was just a weird thing in my head, I guess. But, I started to feel like that apartment was a part of me, or I was a part of it, even if I did hate it and love it at different times.
I think it’s also from growing up in Iowa. My parents still live in the house that we moved into when I was 12. It’s out in the country and there’s land around it, so there’s something about that house that feels a little scary. Like at night in the country with no one around, there’s an ominous feeling. So, yes, that kind of fear from childhood of hearing sounds at night and imagining that they were something about the house coming to life or something possessing the house. Just thinking about the spaces we live in as extensions of ourselves and taking on qualities of who we are. The place you’re most familiar with or the safest place turning against you and having its own consciousness.
Ryan Asmussen
Sometimes, your stories take on allegorical colorings. How intentional is this kind of metaphorical engineering? Or, do you more allow your ideas to rise up and take their own shapes?
Kate Folk
I definitely do it by accident. Anytime I’ve tried to start with a message or an allegorical meaning, the story has felt too obvious or, ultimately, the draft hasn’t been able to pan out into an actual story. Writing for me is a very, very subconscious process. I have to take almost an amateur approach to it. I don’t think about literary elements while writing. Often, the story will start with a general concept that seems interesting, like a head coming out the floor, or it will come from an interesting first sentence and then unspool from there. It’s a kind of magic. Once it’s written, I can recognize metaphorical elements rising up, and I realize that obviously on some level I must have put them there intentionally. But, I can enhance those later. At the start, it’s much more of an organic process of discovery.
Ryan Asmussen
Social commentary appears subtly, here and there, but is very much outright in “A Scale Model of Gull Point,” a dystopian entry. After I finished the collection, I thought it seemed to be the piece that, if the collection was going to be ordered chronologically in terms of narrative time, might be the last story of the book: i.e., all the other stories, arguably, could lead historically up to this one.
Kate Folk
That’s really interesting! I never thought of ordering them chronologically. I was thinking of “Gull Point” not necessarily as the future but more like an alternative version of our present reality. It started with this image of a space needle structure with a rotating restaurant at the top, and then the question of what would happen if people got stuck up there. I had this idea of the prolonged captivity of this one person, and then the visual art angle came afterwards, of her making this model of the town below. In terms of commentary, it seems like something that could exist right now: a fully corporate city where people are used as cheap labor, like the for-profit prison model, the way it’s gotten in the U.S. with inequality and an underclass serving wealthy people. In the story, tourists come to the place and have a vacation and try not to think about the people who are serving them, people living these miserable lives as these wards of Gull Point. You know, I’ve felt that before, being a relatively wealthy American traveling to less wealthy countries. Not to that extreme, obviously, but just that sort of power dynamic and the sense of “Oh, I’m complicit in this evil thing. I’m part of this empire, even if I don’t want to be and disavow it.”
Ryan Asmussen
What do you think of the purpose of art, and the mania that sometimes accompanies the making of it? Is there a redemptive element, like in “Gull Point”?
Kate Folk
I don’t really have any illusions about my writing being important to the world or anything. It’s more like something that’s important to me, something I’ll always do. The most important thing to me is having the ability to have creative expression. To get to write for a living has always been the dream. But, I don’t know, I guess I do feel like it’s kind of a selfish pursuit in the end. But, I also think it’s important for people to create things, that the world would be so much worse if people weren’t able to. I wish there were more ways that people could be supported in the arts, in the U.S. especially. “Gull Point” has an optimistic attitude toward art. That character is able to find creative fulfillment, that’s the most important thing to her, even as the world literally crumbles around her. She feels artistically fulfilled for the first time in years, something that’s potentially worth her dying for.
Ryan Asmussen
The book avoids a hard grimness by being very, very funny. If I’m not mistaken, every story has its moments of light or dark comedy, typically of the comedy-of-manners kind. Was this consciously purposeful or do you find yourself naturally connected to humor?
Kate Folk
I think I’m funnier in my writing than in person. Humor is really important to me. It’s not something I consciously try for, it’s just what interests me in my writing. If I couldn’t have any humor in a story, I don’t think I’d be interested in continuing it. My biggest influence growing up was The Simpsons, more so than any book, especially the golden era seasons, like from three to ten. That really formed my worldview and artistic perspective.
Ryan Asmussen
I was going to ask you about your influences, literary or otherwise, so, as brilliant as The Simpsons are, what about the more literary?
Kate Folk
Flannery O’Connor has been a big influence, short story wise. Her stories are really funny. Writers like Kelly Link, George Saunders, and Karen Russell. In grad school, Alice Monroe was definitely the big short story model for me. I think I read all her collections. She’s the master. I don’t know how she does what she does. After I graduated with my MFA, I started reading Amelia Gray’s work and loved how weird and gross her stories were. In school the focus was very much on realistic fiction, so reading someone like her who just was, like, so out there provided me a model for what I thought I could do next.
FICTION
Out There
By Kate Folk
Random House
Published March 29, 2022