{"id":139082,"date":"2019-08-27T09:13:58","date_gmt":"2019-08-27T13:13:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=139082"},"modified":"2019-08-28T11:44:54","modified_gmt":"2019-08-28T15:44:54","slug":"dark-thread-an-interview-with-kimberly-king-parsons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/08\/27\/dark-thread-an-interview-with-kimberly-king-parsons\/","title":{"rendered":"Dark Thread: An Interview with Kimberly King Parsons"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Kimberly King Parsons is a writer who lives in the wilderness. When we spoke on the phone, we were interrupted by the cawing of a large bird outside the window of her Oregon home, which sits on a hill surrounded by a forest populated with \u201cloud squirrels, loud birds, and voles.\u201d She grew up in Lubbock, Texas, with generations of ancestors rooted in the nearby cities of Quitaque and Turkey, where unsettled land stretches endlessly. She would pass the time by walking miles in any direction.<\/em><\/p>\n

Wildness is in her fiction as well; the story \u201cFiddlebacks\u201d begins with three children shaking out their shoes before putting them on, expelling poisonous insects hidden in the toes. There is also something untamed in her deeply flawed characters, who are constantly caught between reining themselves in and indulging their feral darkness. However, Parsons\u2019s true gift is couching the savage in the great beauty of her prose. Her story \u201cFoxes<\/a>\u201d\u00a0appears in <\/em>The Paris Review\u2019s Summer 2019 issue, and her debut collection,<\/em> Black Light<\/a>,<\/em> was published this month. Our conversation revealed her to be an exacting craftswoman, someone for whom the articulation of each sentence is an act of listening to the character and knowing just when to leave a story.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Have you always known you would be a writer?<\/p>\n

PARSONS<\/p>\n

I grew up an only child, so I used to really love going to birthday parties or hanging out with groups, and at a certain point my role became designated scary-story teller. I don\u2019t know why they chose me, but I loved it. There\u2019s something about having a captive audience and having a room full of terrified people listening to you. I remember knowing that I wanted to be a storyteller or a writer in some way.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Do you remember some of the scary stories you used to tell?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

PARSONS<\/p>\n

Oh, y\u2019know, a lot of them were just cribbed, personalized versions of the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark<\/em>. I\u2019d insert people in the room into those stories or insert our little town into them as the setting. There was this story about there being someone at your window and you\u2019re calling the police, but you\u2019re in between police districts. So you call one precinct and they say, Oh, sorry you know you\u2019re actually in the other county, and then you call the other one and they\u2019re like, No, that\u2019s their problem. And I just loved it. That seems like a very Texas, or a very regional problem to have, to be caught between counties like that.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

What are some of the other touchstones of growing up in Texas?<\/p>\n

PARSONS<\/p>\n

Heat is pervasive, you\u2019re overwhelmingly uncomfortable when you\u2019re outside. There\u2019s the wind and sand and the threat of storms. For me, the geography felt a bit menacing. But also, it meant going to my grandmother\u2019s house and driving on these long roads and looking up at the sky. My dad used to turn off the headlights and we would look at the stars, and it was sort of terrifying. There\u2019s nothing, it\u2019s just a lot of vast nothing in that particular part of Texas where my family was from. There\u2019s boredom that comes with that, but then tons of space to think and tons of wandering around, killing time, going out behind my grandma\u2019s house and just walking for miles in different directions.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

There\u2019s definitely a Texan flavor to what you write\u2014it\u2019s set in Texas, there is a twang to your characters\u2019 voices. Do you think your prose has a distinctly Texan feeling?<\/p>\n

PARSONS<\/p>\n

My mom\u2019s voice is all over the characters and some of that is the particular colorful language that she uses, which can be kind of filthy and kind of bizarre. There\u2019s also a certain volume that goes along with the way people talk in Texas\u2014there\u2019s a lot of shouting. It\u2019s not like other parts of the South where it\u2019s this soft-spoken drawl. It is a twang. I heard it growing up and it was so familiar I didn\u2019t notice it. It wasn\u2019t really until I left that I realized all the ways those little things seep into the writing. It\u2019s more than an accent. It\u2019s something in the syntax.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Who are some of the characters where you can hear your mom\u2019s voice?<\/p>\n

PARSONS<\/p>\n

One character is in the story \u201cIn Our Circle,\u201d which is only two pages, about this guy in a treatment program for rage, and he says of their crafting with clay, \u201cIt didn\u2019t matter if we pinched pots or rolled out dicks and balls.\u201d That\u2019s the kind of thing that my mom would say, not shying away from bodily stuff. It would embarrass me a lot as a young person, but I love the way that all of that bodily stuff seeped in. I feel like that\u2019s a hundred percent my mom.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a music to your writing as well. Have you worked to cultivate a kind of music to your prose or does it come naturally to you?<\/p>\n

PARSONS<\/p>\n

I do work at the sentence level and I\u2019m really hyperaware of what gets to stay in the sentence. I grew up in a household with parents who spoke constantly. My mom would tell the same stories a thousand times and I would know the story but would still be listening to the music of her speaking. She loves talking to everyone, and I was used to listening to her talk to other people or on the phone, just constant conversation. Also since a lot of these stories are told in first person, it\u2019s kind of like they\u2019re all dialogue, in a way. So some of those patterns come pretty naturally from listening to or being held captive by the conversations in the house that I grew up in.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You say the stories are in the first person\u00a0so it\u2019s almost all dialogue\u2014can you say more about that?<\/p>\n

PARSONS<\/p>\n

The way that I approach first person is almost as though the narrator is speaking directly to the reader. Even when they\u2019re not actually speaking in direct address, there\u2019s this urgency in the way that the stories are told so that we know we\u2019re plugged into a precise moment that the narrator is experiencing. To me, it should feel like you\u2019ve just picked up the telephone and this is the story that a person is telling. And so, a lot of the same tics and colloquialisms and odd turns of phrase that would be in dialogue can come through in the actual body of the text. I love first person for that reason, because you immediately get into someone\u2019s head. It feels like dialogue to me in that way.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I want to talk a little bit about the title because it\u2019s really a keynote throughout the collection. It seems every story has some mention of glitter or a glow or light refracting in an artificial way. Glitter is artificial. A black light is not natural. What is this theme? What\u2019s happening here?<\/p>\n

PARSONS<\/p>\n

When I\u2019m walking around in the world, light is something that I think about a lot. Particularly the way light falls on a face and can make people can look beautiful or scary, or how the light in a room can change your perception of the person who is standing in front of you. I wasn\u2019t planning to put these stories together, all of these pieces were written as standalone works. It wasn\u2019t like I was trying to unify them by this theme, that\u2019s just my preoccupation. Everyone has a dark thread and there\u2019s an interplay of light and dark in all people and in all situations. The light on the face doesn\u2019t change the face, it just changes the perception of the face. These stories are trying to get to a true face, to that true thing that doesn\u2019t need light to be illuminated.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Your characters can be so cruel. How do you shape a character, and where you see yourself as a writer? Do you feel like you\u2019re getting into their heads, when you\u2019re writing these characters who can be so vicious?<\/p>\n

PARSONS<\/p>\n

I definitely am writing flawed characters and judgmental characters and people who use words I would never use and who speak to each other in ways I would never speak to another person. When you\u2019re deeply embedded in a narrative voice, you have to be true to that voice, even when they start to say things that you know are ugly. You would never say those things yourself, but you\u2019re just listening at that point. I don\u2019t want to shy away from it because I feel like it does a disservice to the character and to the voice. I also truly believe that everyone, even people who are terrible, deserves to have a voice. That\u2019s not an easy position to come from all the time but I believe that all of these characters are making mistakes. I can\u2019t imagine trying to build the story around the person who\u2019s really healthy and really kind and generous and giving and wonderful. I don\u2019t know what the story is with that! I don\u2019t know how I would construct a narrative around it, and I also think it\u2019s just not true. Every single person is hanging on and holding their shit together, and what I\u2019m trying to find are the cracks and the flaws, not to take them down but to have moments of extreme empathy, enough that we want to stick around with them and hear what they have to say.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Do you feel like your characters have minds of their own at a certain point?<\/p>\n

PARSONS<\/p>\n

Yeah, and it starts to feel really weird because then there\u2019s a certain point where I\u2019m just listening. I know that sounds bizarre. I\u2019m always working with syllables and acoustics and sound and looking to the sentence that came before and using all that recursion, but there\u2019s a certain point where things start to get fast and that\u2014that\u2019s the best part. Because then I can put down the work and go and live my life and there\u2019s still a voice in my head that\u2019s talking, saying, And another thing! And another thing! I know which things are going to stick in the story because they\u2019re the things I don\u2019t forget, and over the course of the day, I have this nagging thing in my head that feels like it\u2019s coming straight from a narrator. It starts to have its own engine.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Your endings can be pretty brutal. I was devastated by the end of the title story, \u201cBlack Light,\u201d which is so abrupt. How do you know when to end a story?<\/p>\n

PARSONS<\/p>\n

It\u2019s always better, in my experience, to arrive late and leave early in every story. I don\u2019t want to follow through to conclusions, and I want to leave a lot of space for the reader. I studied Faulkner in graduate school\u2014Faulkner is a very different writer than I am in all the ways, but one thing that Faulkner does is he always turns away at the moment of violence. There\u2019s a lot of violence in Faulkner\u2019s stories, in Faulkner\u2019s novels, in all of Faulkner\u2019s work. But there\u2019s always this space that opens up for the reader, rather than telling the reader how they\u2019re supposed to feel. I have always adhered to that as a rule. That if you do all the work leading up to the ending, then you don\u2019t have to conclude, you don\u2019t have to finish it. You don\u2019t have to make the landing really hard. You can let the reader fill it in for themselves. It\u2019s possible that at the end of \u201cStarlite,\u201d Jill could get back in her car and go home and never do drugs again and that would be the end of it. But there\u2019s impending doom, amassing tension, that happens when you don\u2019t fill in those blanks.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Do you write beyond the ending and then cut back? Or do you just stop writing?<\/p>\n

PARSONS<\/p>\n

I write sentence to sentence all the time. I never start a story with an idea or a concept or a plot in mind. I\u2019m just going from one line to the next to the next, but there\u2019s usually a certain point, sometimes it\u2019s halfway through, sometimes it\u2019s further along, when I know the ending. I\u2019ll know the last line usually. Exactly the last line. And then it\u2019s just a matter of justifying it or working toward it. But sometimes an ending doesn\u2019t come and then you just know that you need to keep writing until something comes. When I find the ending, I always know it.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

If you write sentence to sentence, where do your first sentences come from?<\/p>\n

PARSONS<\/p>\n

The first one is the hard one. I had a mentor who always talked about how you just have to come up with one sentence. You just have to come up with what he called one true sentence. And if you can find the one true sentence then you\u2019re good, because then you can use recursion through the rest of the story. Every sentence that follows you\u2019re looking backward to see what came before. You\u2019re taking these little seeds from the sentences that came prior and you\u2019re putting them in the next sentence and you\u2019re growing and moving and growing and that\u2019s how you know who is talking and what room they\u2019re in and where they are and what\u2019s their situation and character comes through all those\u2014through the voice. And then plot comes almost as a byproduct of the sentences, so coming up with the first one is the trick. And for me that is usually done almost exclusively off the page. I\u2019m not sitting down writing a thousand versions, it\u2019s something that I\u2019m walking around with, like you would a song that gets stuck in your head, trying to figure out if it\u2019s right. In the same way that I know the last sentence when I come to the last sentence, I know the first sentence. And when I know the first sentence, I can begin.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lauren Kane is a writer who lives in New York. She is the assistant editor at\u00a0<\/i>The Paris Review.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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