Jessica Klimesh
An Interview with Kathryn Kulpa, author of COOKING TIPS FOR THE DEMON-HAUNTED
I recently had the delightful opportunity to interview Kathryn Kulpa about her latest chapbook Cooking Tips for the Demon-Haunted, winner of the 2022 New Rivers Press Chapbook Contest. Kathryn is an editor and workshop instructor at Cleaver, and I’ve had the good fortune to be a student in a couple of her workshops. So I was especially excited to chat with her and learn more about her process, her ideas, and how she so successfully took 14 captivating yet discrete stories and made them fit so effortlessly and perfectly together.
The stories in Cooking Tips for the Demon-Haunted are full of a spectral kind of splendor, displacing the reader with a mix of the familiar and unfamiliar, as in this opening to “Sororal”:
Sister Sister always takes the front and makes me ride in the back. Sister with her doll that’s a ghost of her, ghost of me, held tight in her hand like she’s never going to let us go, my gaze fixed eternally on the back of her head, O Sister Sister her bunny rabbit ears her bunny rabbit nose. Why is she me if I am not her?
Jessica: I’ll start by saying how amazing this collection is! I reread it when I found out I’d be chatting with you, and I found the stories even more hauntingly beautiful on this second full read-through. In fact, I was struck by the fact that, in my opinion at least, there’s not one story out of place in this collection. So, I’d be interested to know: Did you start with a theme? What was your process for writing, sorting through, and ultimately choosing the stories for this collection? Did you find yourself rearranging, removing, and adding much as you put the collection together? What factors influenced your decisions?
Kathryn: Thanks, Jessica! I began with a theme of hauntings when I was putting this collection together, but that was more a retrospective process: I didn’t start out with an idea for a collection and then write a bunch of stories to fit. The stories were written at different times, and published individually, but I’ve noticed a dark, gothic quality in my work coming more to the forefront over, say, the last five or six years. Which makes sense—I’ve always loved reading weird fiction, and when other kids were playing tag, I was the one running around with a broom and starting a witch club—but it didn’t really come through in my writing as much until recently. The title story came from an ekphrastic writing workshop I took with Lorette Luzajic, editor of The Ekphrastic Review, and it was inspired by a surreal painting by Rosa Rolanda. It occurred to me that it would be the perfect title for a flash collection, and then I started thinking about another story I’d published recently, “A Vocabulary for the Haunted,” and it all came together pretty quickly after that. Those two stories set the tone for the collection. Other stories that I considered for this collection had elements of magical realism or fairy tales or something dark or supernatural, but if they didn’t feel “haunted” they didn’t make the final cut.
Jessica: Something else that struck me about Cooking Tips for the Demon-Haunted is the level of emotion packed into each piece, as well as the powerful and exciting mix of reality and un-reality. Some stories are startlingly real, like “Knock” and “Happy Meal.” And “Boy, Dog,” too, which I found myself holding my breath through each time I read it. But other stories have more clearly spectral elements, like “Layover,” one of my favorites, which delicately displaces the reader, creating a subtle but growing sense of gentle foreboding. Could you talk a bit about how you get your ideas, where they come from, and what influences whether you might use more surreal elements in a story or not?
Kathryn: I’m glad you mentioned “Layover.” There are a few stories I’ve written that are taken almost directly from dreams, and that’s one of them. The images of the shower, the strange clothes, the anonymous hotel room and the TV that only played loops of old Star Treks—all from the dream. I woke up and started scribbling down images frantically so I wouldn’t lose anything. Later, I realized the parallels with Greek mythology, and that gave me a way to shape it beyond random dream imagery, but I was hoping it would retain that disorienting nightmare feeling. The surreal elements came naturally! “Happy Meal” was a story that surprised me; it was just going to be a humorous piece about a kid driving a mom crazy in the car and then it went in a very different direction. One of those happy accidents (happy for the writer, not the characters) where you just start writing without a plan. It started with an image of the interior of this car, which was my grandfather’s old car, and I had such a vivid memory of the blue upholstery and the smell of coffee and French fries.
“Knock” was inspired by some passages and descriptions I ran across doing genealogy research; I’ve always been fascinated by that mid-century, post-World War II period and the gap between how life was portrayed in media and advertising and the understories that weren’t told. And “Boy, Dog”: I think that came from a lot of things that had been in my head for a long time. When I was a kid I wanted a dog desperately but it took years to wear my parents down to actually letting me get one, and in the meantime I read all the dog books I could find, these anthologies of “best loved dog stories,” and they’d always have these tales of hero dogs who’d save their masters from falling into the old well; I also would always notice these overpasses along the highway, where people had spray-painted messages or hung class banners, and I’d always think how dangerous that would be; and, finally, the story of Matthew Shepard always haunted me, and all of those things came together in that story, but I also wanted something magical about it. Something that would make it more than a story where the bad guys win.
Jessica: Because I’ve been in a couple of your Cleaver flash workshops, I know that your focus is short and very short fiction. Could you talk a bit about how you started writing flash and what its draw is for you.
Kathryn: Someone in my writing group introduced me to flash fiction, and initially I was kind of skeptical—shouldn’t we know more about these characters? Shouldn’t we have more backstory?—but I got converted pretty quickly. I went to a writing workshop where the leader was following the practice of Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and having us do these short timed writings. You’d have a prompt and then she’d set a timer for 15 or 20 minutes, and the idea was to get through the internal editor and censor and just get it all down on paper. I can be a procrastinator, so I found that having a limited time really worked for me! (It may not for all writers, and that’s fine.) I started writing these really brief pieces at the same time that I was writing longer stories. I think this was also around the time that I read the original flash fiction anthologies Flash Fiction and Sudden Fiction and started looking at the form as its own form, not an abbreviated version of something else. I know when my first short story collection came out, in 2005, I was already writing and publishing flash, and I included two flash pieces in the collection, but some reviewer clearly had no clue and complained that one of them was “only two pages, barely a story at all!” I think that’s less likely to happen now, but I’ve still taught flash workshops in libraries and had people who’ve never heard of it. Some of them end up writing great flash stories, though!
Jessica: It feels like flash is becoming a more popular, or more recognized, individual form. I notice much more attention being given to it, but I don’t know if that’s just because it’s my own genre of choice and so I just seem to notice it more. What are your thoughts on the form and/or the future and/or popularity of the form?
Kathryn: I think you’re right: flash is having a moment. I don’t think it’s quite in the mainstream yet (and that’s all right with me), but it’s definitely not as far out as it was; well-known writers are coming out with flash stories and collections, it’s being published in glossies like the New Yorker and not just in university journals or obscure lit mags, and there are more awards and recognition out there for flash writers. There are a lot more online journals providing space for flash and micro writing. I’ve also seen a lot more how-to books on writing flash. I don’t know what this is going to mean for flash ultimately. It will probably all shake out in the end. I do think the current popularity could have some downsides, people who come to flash because they think it’s “easy” compared to writing “real” stories, and that you just have to follow a formula or have a twist ending or take a piece out of a longer story and call it flash. As we know, no such luck! Writing good flash is hard.
Jessica: You were previously a winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest (2015). Was your process/experience with New Rivers Press similar to your process/experience with Vella? Specifically, was there anything that you learned from the Vella contest that helped you when you were preparing to submit to the New Rivers Chapbook Contest?
Kathryn: Vella was a micro-press with one person, Lisa Mangini, in the lead as editor and publisher, so it was very small and personal. One thing I liked about that contest was she sent me a selection of their other chapbooks, so I could see what they’d published and look at the book designs. I was able to choose my own cover design and I asked an artist friend to create a photograph for me. With New Rivers, the press was part of a university publishing program at Minnesota State University Moorhead. It was still a small press, but I did deal with a few different editors as well as the head of the program. One difference was that I couldn’t choose my own cover image because creating a design was part of the publishing program for the students. But they were good about consulting me and getting my ideas, and, in both cases, I had final approval on edits.
Unfortunately, as of this spring, New Rivers Press is no longer associated with Minnesota State University, so that has made it difficult as far as distribution. One local Rhode Island bookstore was able to get copies before the program was shut down, and I got some for myself and I’m selling them on my website and Etsy shop, but of course it’s not the same as having books available through Amazon or Small Press Distribution. And it would be nice to have a press that did more of the work on publicity, but I know even writers with bigger publishers end up having to take on that job themselves, or hire an independent publicist to do it.
Jessica: Lastly, what advice would you have for someone putting together a chapbook collection and preparing to submit it to either contests or open submission periods for publishers?
Kathryn: If you win the contest or get your manuscript accepted, you’re going to have to answer a lot of questions about the ‘what’ of your collection, so it’s important to have that clear in your own head first. Imagine you’re a bookseller or a librarian, and someone picks up your book and says “What’s this all about?” How do you describe it? What’s the mood? What’s the vibe? How do the stories work with each other, how does one lead into the next, is there a larger story you’re telling through these individual pieces? Find the stories that are the heart of your collection and think about where they will fit, and remember that you need a strong beginning and ending to capture the first readers at these contests or publishers, who are probably reading so many manuscripts. Print out all your essential stories and all your maybes, live with them for a while, shuffle them around, and be ruthless about cutting stories that don’t fit. There will always be another collection! Most important: make sure you love it.
Jessica Klimesh (she/her) is a writer and technical editor whose creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cleaver, Atticus Review, trampset, Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, Does It Have Pockets, and Whale Road Review, among others. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions, and she recently won 3rd Prize in the South Shore Review Flash Fiction Contest. Learn more at jessicaklimesh.com.
