There is no singular path to cultivating a writing career. Joanne Serling and Kimberly King Parsons share the different  trajectories their careers have taken. As writers and parents, carving out time to write has proven to be especially vital for both. Read more about their journeys as they discuss the writing life and offer poignant advice for writers at all stages.

Joanne Serling: I’d love to hear how you managed to secure  not one, but two book contracts.

Kimberly King Parsons: When I was finishing my MFA at Columbia, David Ebershoff (amazing teacher/editor/writer) encouraged me to continue working on a project I’d started in one of his classes. It was a historical novel about a turn-of-the-century animal trainer and his elephant, Topsy, who was electrocuted by Thomas Edison in a public display on Coney Island (true story!). But I took Ebershoff’s encouragement too far–that is to say I worked on that novel for years while knowing deep down it wasn’t really compelling to me. After my second kid was born, I started cheating on my boring elephant book with these sexy, weird short stories. I paid a sitter for childcare six hours a week and I just couldn’t bring myself to work on something that wasn’t exciting to me. I dug up some old stories from my MFA workshops too, brutally edited them, and soon I had this whole strange, dark collection.

Though my stories were getting published and I’d won some contests, I somehow believed the myth that nobody cares about short stories, which is crazy because I absolutely adore the form and always have. When I met my dream agent at the Tin House Summer Workshop in 2017, I kind of apologetically pitched my collection, along with an idea for a new novel, all the while not really expecting anything to happen until I was “ready”– whatever that means. She encouraged me to send her my manuscript (pretty much all we did at that meeting was talk about stories we loved!) and once I got home a friend made me do it quickly before I lost my nerve. Amazingly, I was signed a week later, given some light revisions, and we went out with the stories a couple of weeks after that. We had interest from three places and then an editor at Vintage/Knopf asked me if there might also be a novel on the horizon. I had a synopsis for my new idea, which was based on a short story with a voice I knew I could ride for a longer project– this one hadn’t worked with the rest of the collection but I really liked it. My agent and I went over those materials together and sent them to the editor. A week later they came back to us with a two-book pre-empt. Black Light: Stories is forthcoming from Vintage on August 13, 2019 and the novel (which I’m nearly finished with now) is slated for publication in late 2020ish from Knopf. Getting an agent/making the sale was kind of a dream scenario, but I’ve been writing seriously for more than 15 years (drafts of some of the stories in my collection date back to 2003!) so this definitely didn’t happen overnight.

KKP: And what about Good Neighbors? Can you share a bit about your road to publication?

JS: Your story is totally inspiring. My road to publication could not be more different. I started writing seriously when I was 35 and had just had my second child. I had always said I wanted to write fiction, but had been too afraid to try. It was my husband who pushed me to quit my job and enroll in writing classes. He convinced me that the writing life had to be more flexible than my corporate job and ultimately, more satisfying. The early years were horrible. I had totally unrealistic expectations of what success looked like and meanwhile, couldn’t even perfect a two page exercise for my workshops at The Writers Studio, a writing school in the West Village of NYC. Slowly, over many years, I learned to love the process, and most importantly, to go easy on myself. When I finally gave up my preconceived ideas about what a writer is supposed to look like and be like, I started discovering my material, which was largely about groups and the way people are drawn to them as a way of hiding their true identity and avoiding intimacy. I also knew I wanted to explore the myth of “good” parenting and the subtle line between denial and serious lying.

I remained in my weekly writing program at The Writers Studio for 8 years, and then, when I felt ready to tackle a novel, left to form a writing group with some fellow students. The first draft of Good Neighbors came quickly (about two years), but the agent search was exhausting and fruitless at first. It was like exploring a black box. I had no idea what I was doing. The good news is that I did get some good reads and some feedback and decided to revise the manuscript before sending it out again. The revision took eight months: four months of sitting around stuck and depressed and then four months writing madly, sometimes for eight hours a day. (My kids were at overnight camp at the end!) When I went out to search for an agent the second time, I truly believed in the book and refused to give up on it, which was a good thing because it took another eight months to get representation. Eventually, Duvall Osteen at Aragi fell in love with the novel and the book sold fairly quickly after that. All in all, it was about a six year process from initial draft to publication.

JS: You’ve written a lot of very acclaimed short fiction. Do you approach short stories differently than a novel?

KKP: I love both forms for very different reasons. I love how tight a story has to be, the precision and economy it requires. You can’t have those kind of saggy, meandering sentences that are completely fine (and even refreshing!) in a novel. I love writing totally disparate beginnings and middles and endings–and I love how in a collection you get to do those tricks over and over.

But the novel gives you space to play and time to really sit with characters. My favorite novels are the weird ones: Renata Adler’s Speedboat, Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, Michael Ondaatje’s Coming through Slaughter. I love how voice-driven and strange those books are, and it’s fascinating to see how very differently those writers approach form. My novel messes with chronology and perception and identity (psychedelics play a role) and writing it is just really fun in a way I hadn’t anticipated.

KKP: Who are your influences?

JS: Identity and perception– two of my favorite topics! Plus, I’m dying to read Speedboat, which so many of my writer friends have raved about over the years. My two favorite novelists are Edith Wharton and Alice McDermott; I’ve read everything they’ve ever written multiple times, probably because I’m very interested in class and in the everyday domestic lives of women. I also adore the novel Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell. It’s an indelible portrait of a housewife navigating the changing American landscape between the first and second World Wars. I was amazed when I read it by the similarities between the domestic world of Mrs. Bridge and modern American motherhood. I knew I wanted to write something similar. Lastly, I was hugely influenced by Kate Walbert’s novel in stories, Our Kind. Her wonderful portraits about a certain generation of upper middle class women, told in the first-person plural, were like a gateway drug for me. For many years and many drafts, I used a similar narrative style to help tell the story of Good Neighbors. Eventually, I switched the narrative to first person and relegated the large “we” narrator to the prologue and epilogue, but Walbert’s book was a huge inspiration.

JS: Can you talk about your themes and/or obsessions when it comes to fiction?

KKP: The voices I write are mostly weirdos, losers, bighearted fuck-ups, and children (i.e., my very favorite people). Like you, I’m also interested in class and my novel touches on domesticity/motherhood. Virginia Woolf said, “Behind the cotton wool of daily life is hidden a pattern.” I’m drawn to characters who seek magic in the mundane, who want to get at the world underneath this one. Other themes/obsessions include bi-invisibility, game playing, music, adults behaving badly, experimentation with psychedelics, hoarding, and regret.

KKP: Can you tell me a little bit about your process?

JS: Sure, but first I have to say–adults behaving badly–people do not give that topic enough attention in my opinion.There’s this myth now that if you eat healthy food and give up smoking and exercise regularly that you are somehow a model citizen that will never again feel the dark undertow of vice and lust and just generalized self-destruction. I think so many people are seething inside, slowly dying, convinced that they’re not “good enough,” when really, we are all just primal humans struggling to get by. But I digress . . .

For me, my process is to feel as normal and sane as possible so that I can be as wild on the page as possible. (I think that’s a paraphrase of a quote.) My method is to get up and immediately exercise, which burns off most of my anxiety and helps get me out of my head. Then I schedule something for the afternoon so that I have a deadline to work towards. Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of tutoring with high school seniors who need help with their college essays. I love the work and feel really inspired by their stories. In between exercising and tutoring, I write for 2-4 hours a day.

JS: Everyone’s process is so idiosyncratic. Can you talk about yours? Do you have a typical writing day?

KKP: I think that’s maybe Flaubert you’re paraphrasing–”Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work”–and I’m exactly the same way! I write about outsiders and troublemakers but my daily life could not be more “normal.” My partner and I have two little kids and up until a few months ago I was working as Director of Marketing at a design firm. Now my days are free for writing while my kids are at school, so for the first time ever I’m able to touch the work regularly. I’ve tried to stick to word counts, but a lot of the time I wilI just write for an hour or two first thing in the morning so that I can feel good about the rest of the day. I take breaks to read–I read a ton–and to watch movies that might help with parts of the project. If I’m truly stuck I will take a nap or a hot shower. I love what you said about having a deadline to work towards in the afternoon. I find that helps me too. My built-in deadline is picking the kids up and of course the moment things start to get really good is usually the same moment I have to stop. But there’s something great about that too, waking up excited to get to the computer. The other day my older son said, “You’re always in such a good mood in the morning when you help us get ready for school.” And of course I am, because I know that I’m about to get hours of silence.

JS: Are you working on anything new or finishing up the novel?

KKP: I’m sneaky so I’m always cheating on whatever project I’m supposed to be devoted to–in addition to finishing the novel, I have half a dozen stories in various states of revision that I like to steal away with from time to time.

KKP: And what about you? What’s been happening since your book came out?

JS: I love that you’re cheating; I’ve never been good at that but it sounds fun. I’ve been balancing writing with some promotional activities for Good Neighbors, speaking engagements at local bookstores and libraries. I was fortunate to be invited to speak at the Levis JCC in Boca Raton, Florida in February 2019. I’m really looking forward to the warm weather and what’s promised to be a very engaged crowd of avid readers. I’m also working on a new novel, which is quite different than the last one plot-wise but explores some of the same territory in terms of secrets and identity and the ways in which we can never fully escape from our past.

KKP: Do you find the process of writing this second novel easier than your first?

JS: I’m actually finding it harder, partly because I’m not sure I’m ready to expend so much emotional energy again. For the last book, I wrote from pure feeling and fashioned a plot around it. This time I’ve got a plot but haven’t taken the deep dive yet into the material. It’s the deep dive where the satisfaction comes from both for the writer and the reader. I’m slowly easing myself into it.

KKP: Was there anything surprising that happened after publishing Good Neighbors? Maybe a reader’s reaction or an opportunity or just something you hadn’t expected beforehand?

JS: I was shocked by how many readers professed to dislike all of the characters. To me, they were just humans: flawed, imperfect, but well intentioned. I purposely created a situation which had no right answers and wanted to pose a question about community, not offer an answer. But somehow into that void, many readers (not all) fashioned a judgement about how these characters failed. I found that fascinating. The judgment.

JS: What are you reading at the moment?

KKP: Lucia Berlin was a brilliant genius and I’m reading her collection Evening in Paradise. T Kira Madden has a gorgeous memoir coming out in March called Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls. I keep picking it up off the shelf– literally every line sparkles. I adored Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters so I’m reading The Widow’s Children now. And because of my kids I’m reading Pete the Cat ad nauseam. My oldest son is also writing a book about a drop of blood who works in a laboratory. I’ve been reading drafts (and drafts!) of that.

KKP: I get really giddy about book recommendations so I’ll ask you the same question! What have you been reading?

JS: I just started reading Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation. It’s so subversive and brilliant that I’m planning an immediate re-read. I also loved The Possible World by Liese O’Halloran Schwarz, which is a really surprising and deep meditation on aging, death and the afterlife. In between, I devoured Dinner at the Center of the Earth by Nathan Englander, who is among my favorite writers.

JS: What if any writing advice would you give to a new writer?

KKP: Do the project you want to do, not the project you think will sell. Follow every curiosity and remember that everything is allowed on the page.

KKP: And what about you? Any advice?

JS: Don’t rely too much on advice! I spent too much time thinking that if I didn’t write every day, or didn’t write first thing in the morning that I wasn’t a dedicated enough writer. You have to find the process that works for you. For me, that’s being busy and working part time. For someone else, it might be taking long walks and frequent naps.

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Kimberly King Parsons is the author of Black Light, a short story collection forthcoming from Vintage in 2019, and the novel The Boiling River, forthcoming from Knopf. Her writing has appeared in Best Small Fictions 2017, Black Warrior Review, No Tokens, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Portland, OR and can be found at www.kimberlykingparsons.com and on Instagram and twitter.

 

Joanne Serling’s debut novel, GOOD NEIGHBORS, was published by Twelve/Grand Central publishing in February 2018. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in New Ohio Review and North American Review. She is a graduate of Cornell University and studied and taught fiction at The Writers Studio in New York City. Previously, she worked in women’s magazines, high tech public relations and as Director of Public Affairs for American Express.  She lives in New Jersey with her husband and children where she is at work on her second book. She can be found online at: www.joanneserling.com and on Instagram and Facebook