Keeping out of step

Interview with Katie Chase, by Marianne Kunkel

Katie Chase’s short fiction has appeared in the Missouri Review, Five Chapters, Narrative, and The Best American Short Stories. She's the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Michener-Copernicus Award. She grew up near Detroit.

MK: Your story “The Sea that Leads to All Seas” (Prairie Schooner, Winter 2010) largely takes place in post-9/11 Chicago. As a story about, among other subjects, displaced homeland, what about Chicago appealed to you as a setting?

KC: It was an obvious practical choice, in that I'd just moved from Chicago after living there three years and I’d heard close-hand of stories like Hassan and Mohamed’s. So much 9/11-related literature takes place, inevitably, in New York, but the effects of 9/11, in a very real and devastating way, reached much further, further even than the second city. Chicago is an extremely livable and diverse city, attractive to many immigrants, with great art, music and literary scenes. It's interesting that you phrase your question the way you do, because I suppose for me, coming from the economically devastated state of Michigan, and for many other young people in the Midwest looking for the economic and cultural opportunities of a big city, Chicago stands as a beacon.

Frequently in the story the main character allows others—both her mother and boyfriend—to rest their heads on her breast. This powerful image not only emphasizes the main character’s readiness for a child, but positions her as a mother figure representing home, echoed at the story’s end when you write that a character who has returned home “belongs to his mother.” Did you orchestrate these head-on-breast moments deliberately or did they emerge naturally as you wrote? 

I did consciously double that image (in the writing, the scene with the dental student came first, and so far as I can remember, emerged there fairly naturally), but I didn't exactly carry its meaning to its full conclusion in my mind, not to the extent you've so thoughtfully elucidated. I thought of it more in terms of character—Larissa sees David as, emotionally, needing her more than she does him; she believes she has the upper hand. Of course, in the scene with the mother, it is Mohamed who “orchestrates” the gesture during the shoot.

Your characters seem so purposely developed and undeveloped, as seen, for example, in your choice not to unveil the dentist’s name until late in the story and through the voice of the main character’s mother. What would you say is the ultimate role of Hassan, a friend of the main character’s ex-boyfriend, whom by the story’s end hangs in a kind of identity limbo when you write, “She has never made of him a messenger, wants to believe him still a friend”?

Hassan, Mohamed’s brother, seemed important as a contrast. His ready presence and his interest in Larissa helps to emphasize that in accepting Mohamed's advances, she made a choice; she wanted him. At the detention center, while Hassan has more or less committed the same “crime” as has Mohamed, that he is not abused, physically, and is released, allowed to stay out his visa, might allow the reader to presume some things about Mohamed's actions while detained. Larissa is an only child, without her father. Above all, it seemed somehow important Larissa have a relationship with a man that was not sexual, but that still blurred the lines. I imagined Hassan’s willingness to be on her side as based, to some extent, on his attraction to her, and I wanted her to feel some discomfort from that.

In this story the main character struggles to make sacrifices and lower her romantic expectations. Can you share some of the sacrifices that you have had to make as a writer? Is failure valuable for writers?

Where to begin? Every day that I wake up early to write before my day job I sacrifice sleep; every weekend that I spend writing I sacrifice fun. In following the writing-related opportunities I've been lucky to have had, I've lived places I never thought I'd live, and up till now, I haven’t settled in a place intending to call it home. I’ve held maybe one job longer than a year, something not exactly helpful in securing employment in this economy. I don't own an iPhone or an iPad or expensive shoes or clothes. I'm being a little facetious, because I don’t really regret any of it and surely it can't all be blamed entirely on writing. But putting writing first has been so central to my life thus far that I can’t really conceive of who or where I’d be without it. I don't know if failure is valuable for writers, but rejection, and being seen as, or even feeling, a little out of step with the rest of the American population, are pretty much inevitable, so you have to be prepared to deal somehow with them.

What resolution might you make for 2011 that pertains to writing?

I'd love this year to finish a draft of the novel I started recently. Resolutions feel too tinged with wishful thinking and too often aren't carried through—and I'm not the fastest, most efficient writer—so I'm thinking of it more in terms of continuing the habit of bit-by-bit, day-by-day.