TSR:
What
does the word "story"
mean to you?
KP:
Pulls a thread from the heart and wraps it around a drowning spider.
Attaches bait to the hook and submerges it in the atom-field. Eats the
dead flesh from a live wound. Stokes the fire in the duff. Intersperses
the firmament with the terra firma. Forgives with an arrow and seeks
vengeance with a white feather. Saves the last bite on the plate for
the “One Who Does Not Eat”.
TSR:
Do you have a reader in mind when you write stories?
KP:
My characters are my readers. I want to do right by them. Whatever it
is that allows me to imagine a character is inextricably linked to that
which allows me to imagine a reader.
TSR: Is
there
anything you'd like to ask someone who has read your collection,
anything at all?
KP: My
writing process is like this: I net language/ substance debris that has
risen to the surface of the flood and then arrange the debris into
tableaux on my raft. So I wonder how people constructed “story” while
reading the book, and how that process might be different from the
reading of a more straightforward narrative.
TSR:
How does
it feel knowing that people are buying your book?
KP: I feel deeply appreciative.
TSR:
What are you working on now?
KP: One
project I’m working on now is a novel involving characters who
experience continuous states of mental, physical, and temporal morphing
and transformation. What is emerging is a highly mutable narrative: not
so much an arc as a undulating spiral.
