SmokeLong Quarterly

No one can accuse you of not getting right to it, not keeping the action going. What are people accusing you of instead these days?

Depends on who’s doing the accusing.

If you ask my spouse, it would probably be “moving my [insert possession here],” or “being the mayor of Hyperbole Town,” which is an appointed position, in case you were wondering. If you ask my colleagues: doing too much. If you ask that one guy from workshop (you know the one), it’s a crapshoot between “passé millenialisms,” “bourgois [sic] feminism,” and “sounding hifalutin”… yowzah!

I just asked my ten-year-old—she said, “Being silly.”

I love the detail of the fast food napkins bursting out of the glovebox. What’s trapped inside KT’s glovebox, ready to reintroduce itself to the world?

During my MFA—and this was 2019, before COVID—I earned the nickname “Apocalypse Mom” by making a habit of magically producing whatever a person might need at a given moment. Ibuprofen? Obviously. Hair tye? Check. Snack? Yup. Miniature copy of the U.S. Constitution? Hell yeah. Band-Aid? Tampon? Spare pen? Game hen?! Sky’s the limit. And that was just my backpack … imagine the world of wonders contained within my 2017 Toyota Highlander’s glovebox, awaiting their moment to shine!

When some agent approaches you about extending this into a novel, is the tragic backstory of the bumper bra going to be your focus, or will you keep moving forward, toward the wall?

OK. This might be the best interview question ever. But also, the world “novel” just made my heart fall out of my butt (to borrow a favorite phrase of my program bestie here at UH). Maybe I shouldn’t admit this, but I barely write anything you could call fiction. I guess someday the Spirit of the Novel might appear to me miraculously in a moment of sublime inspiration, but as of today, I’ve been chipping away at the same three short stories for the past seven years.

But if the impossible were to happen: I would probably do one of those magical time things novelists do, where the wall keeps getting closer, fragment by fragment, throughout the book, in between flashbacks illuminating the tragic backstory of not only the bumper bra, but also the jack-in-the-box, the boyfriend’s doomed hand, yacht rock, Habitat for Humanity, and voting your conscience.