AN INTERVIEW WITH KIM FU, AUTHOR OF LESSER KNOW MONSTERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY, THE 2023 SELECTION FOR SPOKANE IS READING

BY SHARMA SHIELDS

Kim Fu’s dynamic and wondrous story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is the 2023 selection for Spokane Is Reading. Events will take place on October 26th at Spokane Valley Library at 1 p.m. and at Central Library at 7 p.m. Local novelist and Spokane Public Library’s Writing Education Specialist Sharma Shields sent some questions over to Kim Fu that the author kindly responded to over email.

Sharma Shields (SS): The presence of the metaphorical is profound in this collection: Can you talk about your relationship to metaphor and how it evolved in your work?

Kim Fu (KF): A lot of the writers I love are masters of figurative language and metaphor, like Heather O’Neill, Kevin Brockmeier, Karen Russell, and Ted Chiang. I remember reading, many years ago now, Brockmeier’s story “The Ceiling,” about the end of a marriage where the sky is literally falling, and feeling like this was the kind of story I’d always wanted to write. But I try not to think about the metaphorical readings of a story until late in the writing process, particularly for stories with unreal elements. For example, in one story, a girl growing wings out of her legs is an obvious metaphor for puberty, but while I was writing the story I tried to think about the wings as straightforwardly and literally as possible: How would they work? How would these characters react? What would they do next? I try to let the real-world parallels emerge on their own at first, and only reshape towards them while editing.

SS: I love the tension here between the fantastical and the mundane, the playful and the serious; do you consider contrast and tension as you write? How do you achieve such a surprising and satisfying balance?

KF: I do try to vary the emotional texture of a story as I’m writing. I struggle to read a work of fiction that is, for example, relentlessly grim from start to finish. Even an action movie needs moments of peace that remind you what the heroes are fighting for. Little things like the length of sentences and paragraphs, or where you put dialogue or white space, can change that balance a lot. But finding levity in darkness, profundity in irreverence, magic in the banalthat’s also closer to how I think real life works. The night my father died, when my mother and sisters and I came home from the hospital, we suddenly all realized at the same time how hungry we were. We ate milk and cookies in the kitchen at three in the morning, and we laughed at ourselves, at how strange it was that we could even think of cookies during one of the worst nights of our lives. I think most stories have those cookies in them.

SS: It’s really difficult for me to choose a favorite story from this collection. What story was the easiest for you to write? What story proved the most challenging, and why?

KF: I can’t think of which one was the easiest to write. They all felt so challenging at the time! “Scissors” was probably the hardest to write in many ways. It first appeared in Kink, an anthology of stories about desire and BDSM edited by Garth Greenwell and R.O. Kwon. I’d felt inspired by Garth’s essays and interviews on the often underutilized power of writing explicitly about sex and pleasure, as a site of personal, cultural and metaphysical meaning. In general, I’d mainly written about sex as awkward or traumatic, and pleasure was something to glide past with one abstract sentence or a section break. I was unprepared for how vulnerable and frightening it would feel to write this story, to even think about trying to capture embodied, erotic joy. I still have trouble looking at that story even now, or thinking about it being out in the world.

SS: There are such arresting images in this book and the prose glitters with so many breathtaking treasures. How do you approach and hone your writing on the sentence level? How has your work as a poet influenced your prose?

KF: This goes back to your question about metaphor - I think reading and writing poetry trains you to observe the world closely, to try to find new ways to describe familiar things, in language that feels fresh and precise. I also think poetry, more than other forms, tends to leave things unsaid and implied, trusting the reader to make leaps in logic and construct the world of the poem as much as the writer does. I find the moments where fiction asks the reader to do that kind of work are often the most powerful.

SS: What was the editorial process for this book? How did the stories grow and change as they moved from an individual form into a full manuscript?

KF: My editor at Tin House, Masie Cochran, was essential to helping each story find its final form within the collection. She pointed out echoes and throughlines between stories, what felt unifying and what just felt repetitive. She was especially insightful about endings that weren’t quite right - a missing penultimate scene, an ending line that sounded pretty but didn’t feel earned. I remember one early phone conversation where her what-ifs and enthusiasm were so interesting and infectious, I hung up eager to return to the stories that needed the most work. I also credit her with the final ordering of the stories, which is very different from the original manuscript I submitted. It was her idea that “PreSimulation Consultation XF007867” should open the collection. In my mind, it felt risky to open with what is arguably the weirdest story. I worried that it would alienate readers, or alternatively, overpromise weirdness that the rest of the collection didn’t deliver. But she felt it would draw the right reader, the reader who would connect to the book as a whole. And now I can’t imagine it any other way.

SS: What books are on your nightstand right now? What’s the last book you read that you really loved and why?

KF: I’m in the middle of one of those rare runs where I’ve loved a lot of books in a row. Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022, edited by Rebecca Roanhorse, is full of unforgettable gems. I loved the exploration of disgust, cultural programming, and the idea of normalcy in Life Ceremony and Earthlings by Sayaka Murata, both translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori. I also finally got around to reading The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder, which had been on my nightstand for ages - at once an Orwellian nightmare and a haunting, beautiful fable. I love Claire Fuller’s prose, and her latest, Unsettled Ground, was no exception. I just yesterday finished Yellowface by R. F. Kuang, and I was blown away by the audacious and painfully accurate depiction of the publishing industry.

SS: Do you frequent any public libraries? Which ones? Any public library memories and/or experiences to share?

KF: Oh, yes! The Magnolia branch of the Seattle Public Library is closest to my home, so that’s where I pick up my holds, but I wrote a lot of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century in the Ballard, Fremont, and Central locations. There’s a writing group facilitated by Alma García that meets in the basement of the Fremont branch, and though I only went a few times, I found it so fruitful each time. I wrote the very first version of what would become “Bridezilla” there. The Seattle Central Library used to have a lunchtime “storytime for grown-ups” called Thrilling Tales, where librarian David Wright would do dramatic readings of short stories, usually older, pulpy stories in the public domain with great twists and turns. His selections and performances were hugely influential on Monsters.

SS: Have you spent much time in Spokane?

KF: I haven’t! I moved to Seattle from Canada over ten years ago but I still haven’t gotten to explore nearly as much of the state as I would like. I can’t wait!

ABOUT KIM FU

Kim Fu is the author of two novels, a collection of poetry, and most recently, the story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, winner of the 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Award and a finalist for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Fu has been longlisted for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize for mid-career authors. Fu lives in Seattle, Washington.