Young Folks at Home: A Conversation with Kristen Arnett 
By Jason Katz 
 
I first heard Kristen Arnett’s name from Lauren Groff while she was on tour with her short story collection, Florida. I asked Groff about some of her favorite Florida writing. After rattling off the names of some greats, including the legendary Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, she said “Kristen Arnett is a very promising talent.” 
 
It didn’t take long thereafter to become aware of Kristen’s twitter. Her most popular posts have gotten over half a million likes. If the strength of her twitter following is an affirmation of her talent, Kristen is a superstar. Since such a correlation makes Katy Perry the most talented person in the world, I’ll just say that her debut story collection, Felt in the Jaw was a master class in Florida writing. Her prose moves slowly, as though it has been walking across an open field in the summer heat, building up a sweat of palpable tension that eventually sinks into a morass. 
 
Her debut novel, Mostly Dead Thingscomes out on Tin House this June. It’s about a lesbian taxidermist who has to take over her family’s business after the patriarch commits suicide. 
 
Jordan Hill and I met Kristen last November at the Eden Bar in Maitland, FL to drink beer and discuss important issues like snakes in drying machines and crayons in the library copier, but also serious matters, like how Kristen wants to stay in Florida forever.
 
At the end of the interview, we offered to buy Kristen’s drinks. She said, “No man buys drinks for me!”  
 
 
 
 
JK: What you been up to? 
 
KA:  I just got back from Austin. I was the Texas Book Fest. My ex-wife was watching the dogs while I was gone, and right when I got back, she was like “oh, so great to see you!” and then threw my phone on the floor by accident. And it broke. 
 
JK: Your ex-wife accidentally threw your phone on the floor?
 
KA: It was really an accident! 
 
JK: How was Texas Book Fest? 
 
KA: It was great. I love Austin. I was going to see some people this time. Alex Chee was there. So was Tommy Pico. 
 
JK: Who’s Tommy Pico? 
 
KA: He’s a queer, Native poet. He has a book coming out on Tin House. He’s great. We met at Lambda. We were both Fellows there. He does a lot of really good performance poetry. He has a book called Junkcoming out. They just picked up another one called Feed. It’s a kind of epic poem. I have something coming out on Tin House too. It’s just a novel though. 
 
JK: Bill Clegg just came to read at FIU. He’s an agent and a writer and he said if he had to choose one, he’d be an agent. If you had to choose between being a writer and a librarian, which one would you choose? 
 
KA: I’d choose to write. Look, I love librarianship, but writing has never stuffed crayons inside a copying machine. It’s just fucked up my brain. 
 
JK: Is that the most absurd thing that’s happened in the library? 
 
KA: Oh my god, I wish it was. You can talk to any librarian and they’ll tell you the most weird-ass crazy shit stories, especially the more public the library is. You just get nonsense. It’s funny in hindsight but maybe not as funny when it’s my daily thing. It can be very rewarding. I’m also not the kind of person who just can’t be working at all times. Writing is definitely work but I think I’ll always at least be part time in the library. If not just to be around other humans. I can’t just be Howard Hughes’ing in my house all day. 
 
JK: You write at home? 
 
KA: Yeah, it’s just me and the dogs and I start talking to them and myself. 
 
JK: And you just drink until they talk back? 
 
KA: Exactly. 
 
JK: You have multiple dogs? 
 
KA: I have three dogs, a cat, and a hamster – his name is Aunt Karen. 
 
JK: Do you actually haven an Aunt Karen? 
 
KA: No, I made a joke before I got him that if I ever got another pet, I’d name them Aunt Karen so I could use it to get out of social obligations. I could be like “Oh, Aunt Karen’s really sick or Aunt Karen’s chewing her foot again. Looks like I’ve got to go!”  
 
JK: What neighborhood are we in right now? 
 
KA: This is Maitland. It’s really small. A tiny suburb inside of Orlando. I live just nearby. I grew up in Winter Park which is just east of here and I work at a law library in Orlando. 
 
JK: How’s that?
 
KA: It’s fine. I was talking about librarianship the other day. A big part of being a writer is being a reader. Probably the most important part of writing is being a reader. If you don’t read a lot, you can tell your writing suffers. So, I’m in this law library and not exactly engaging with the collection. I don’t read torts. In fact, I have no idea what I’m looking at most of the time. It’s fine though. 
 
JK: Some friends have talked about transitioning from writing books to writing plays or for the screen just for the social element of it. Is that something you’ve considered? 
 
KA: I’m actually working on some stuff right now. I can’t talk about it. But it’s an interesting question because I never thought of it as being a more social thing. And it really has been. You know how fiction writing can operate at a snail’s pace sometimes. 
 
JK: Right, Bill Clegg told us that even if he reads a book and it’s all systems go to publish it, that it will still be another year and a half before it’s published. 
 
KA: Yes, exactly. And even with short fiction being published online. It takes a long time. You’re just watching your Submittable in progress and kind of doing the sign of the cross over it. While the act of taking something, you’ve written and adapting it for the screen feels like a lightning quick process. As a person with zero patience for things a lot of the time, it’s been fulfilling. I like to work quickly. My Inbox is always at 0. I reply to everything. Right now, my fiction writing is not a collaborative process. It’s not something up for discussion. People aren’t passing it around and putting their hands in it. It’s been different. Not bad though. 
 
JK:  Sounds very different from our experience in MFA workshops. Did you ever consider attending one? 
 
KA: I did think about it, but I was already working in libraries. I knew I needed to go do my masters, but I was thinking about it in terms of what was going to pay bills, so I had to do library school. I’d been writing my whole life, so I was thinking about it like I would get a library job after school and then possibly do a low-res MFA somewhere. I couldn’t monetarily go after my MFA. I think there’s a fuck-ton of value in it though. 
 
JK: You ever think about teaching? 
 
KA: Noooooo, I’d be terrible. It’s hilarious because I’m going to University of Tampa on Wednesday and doing a craft talk and a reading, and I was like just like, “oh, no.” I’m sitting there trying to do a PowerPoint and it’s just a foreign feeling to me. Usually when I think of my writing, it’s not in the context of me speaking in front of a room on it in an authoritative way. I also think that just because I think something works for me, it doesn’t mean it works for everybody. 
 
JK: So, what’s your approach to a craft talk then? 
 
KA: Mat Johnson gave a talk about dialogue and approaching it in a way that’s actually like voicing it. It spoke to me. I’m kind of looking at it like that. Sometimes I get feedback on my writing where people are like, “Your Twitter’s so funny, why isn’t your writing like this?” I feel like just because I’m funny in some capacities, doesn’t mean I’m always going to be funny. It doesn’t mean I can’t be. It’s just not what’s important to me about writing. The book that’s coming out with Tin House is definitely funnier, but also in this way I write, where I’m examining a question. You see, I obscure my emotions a lot of the time with jokes because I don’t want to deal with things. I can’t do that with my writing. I want to deal with those things in my writing. If I obscure them, I’m being glib or examining what I should be. Just because Kristen doesn’t want to deal something, doesn’t mean the character won’t.
 
JK: I had that experience reading Felt in the Jaw. 
 
KA: Mat was talking a lot about that. He’s not afraid to be funnier in his writing. He was talking about when he first finished his MFA program, he showed some work to his friends. I think he said it was Victor Lavalle. He was like, “here it is!” and his friend was like, “this is good, but it doesn’t sound like you at all.” And he was like “I’m trying to do something that’s literary,” and his friend was like “literary can be funny.”  That’s something that I struggle with because I try to make a lot of jokes but when I’m writing about stuff, especially queerness, I don’t want them to necessarily be jokes to people, because I know that I also have a straight audience, or an audience that is engaging with my work in a way that isn’t expressly queer, so I want to make jokes where people are laughing with me, not so they can laugh at it. A lot of what I was trying to do in Felt in the Jaw was to examine things that weren’t exactly funny. I’m very interested in the queerness in domesticity, for example. I want to examine that because there’s this heteronormative aspect to it. 
 
GS: Right, like in “Aberrations in Flight?” 
 
KA: Yes, exactly. I wanted to examine roles in households. It happens all the time in queer relationships. There’s this thing, where we tangentially fall into roles, like, “Oh, you’re the more butch one, you’re going to do this,” and “you’re the more femme one so you’re going to do this,” and that’s not necessarily how real relationships function but we impose expectations on households. A lot of this specific collection is trying to examine that. It’s something that I’ve always been interested in. I still don’t either understand it either. I mean, I’m single now. 
 
GS: Do you like it that way? 
 
KA: It’s been good. I was together with somebody for ten years. They were very supportive of my work but it’s also a very different animal being in a relationship that long versus not being in one…. 
 
GS: A lot of your stories are about children in danger, including “The Graveyard Game,” your recently published story in Guernica. 
 
KA: That just got nominated for a Pushcart Prize! Yeah, and I think that’s something I’m examining also more recently. Where I was focusing more on relationships between partners, maybe now I’m examining parent-child relationships. Though it still falls within the world of domesticity, which is very interesting to me – household dynamics. There’s a lot there. It’s considered a feminine domain and I think it’s important to reexamine that notion of why it is? 
 
GS: I picked up a lot of that in the characters of “Aberration of Flight.”  
 
KA: Right, and part of it is thinking you understand your role in a relationship and then realizing that you’re wrong about it and that the other person sees it completely differently. You just can’t be in somebody else’s head. 
 
GS: Right, I think this story collection explores how people in relationships handle those moments. Switching gears, the thing that always sticks out for me in this collection are the ways that kids got themselves into danger. Reminds me of my youth. 
 
KA: Did you grow up in Florida? 
 
GS: Yeah, Miami. 
 
KA: Yeah, there are a lot of ways we can hurt ourselves here! Just knowing in your backyard there are a million things that can kill you or hurt you, and how we interact with that environment. 
 
GS: I like how you list all of the different flora and fauna of Florida throughout the stories. I feel it’s impossible to only pick one, so I like how you make long lists. 
 
KA: It’s everything around you all of the time. I was trying to describe this to a friend of mine that came to visit from Las Vegas. They were overwhelmed by this. And I was like, growing up here you develop a sort of blindness. 
 
GS: You’ve become reptile blind? 
 
KA: Hah, yes. It’s also how growth creeps up on everything. How quickly things become invasive. How many bugs you have to deal with. There’s a lot of stuff you get used to. Other places have things they get used to, I’m sure, like scraping ice off a windshield or something.   
 
GS: It’s just not the same as waking up because there’s a massive palmetto bug on your chest.
 
KA: Exactly. There was one on my back the other night and I had no idea until my cat murdered it. And I was like, “well… whatever,” and went back to sleep. You can’t do anything about it! I like this idea of not being able to keep anything out of the house. A lot of interactions with wildlife don’t allow you to have the distance you might want to have. It’s a completely immersive experience. I have this snake that lives at my house. For a while, it was outside the A/C unit. Then it started coming in through a crack in the door to the laundry room. And lately it’s been crawling in the washing machine. I was about four beers in recently, another one in my hand, and was going to do laundry because I was going to do some NPR thing the next day and I threw open the washing machine and the snake was there, and I just picked it up! So, I’ve got the beer in one hand, the snake in the other and then I’m trying to take it back through the house. The dogs are freaking out. I finally get it outside but now every time I do the laundry, I have to make sure it’s not there. What I’m really afraid of is not that I’ll have to pick it up again, it’s that I won’t see it and I’ll start the washing machine and it’s going to rip it up in there, and...
 
JK: RUIN YOUR CLOTHES!
 
KA: AND RUIN MY CLOTHES! There is no reprieve from interacting with things here. The outside is the inside. Maybe that’s the same for other places too but here is on another level. 
 
JK: Maybe only the desert in the Southwest? 
 
KA: Yeah, they’ve got scorpions and old wooden houses and shit. 
 
JK: Exactly, so the cover Felt in the Jawis an alligator skull, right? There are no alligators in the book though! 
 
KA: That’s funny you say that. My friend, Alana, did the cover art for me and usually she does a lot of collage. I didn’t give her any specifications. Right there on the spot, she just freehand drew the skull. I liked the idea of it being an open thing. Here’s the thing. And you know this. In so much of Florida stuff, there is an implied alligator. I just liked the idea of a skull too. You know, the next book is about taxidermy – a lesbian taxidermist who takes over her family’s shop in central Florida. I’m so excited. Karen Russell is doing a blurb for me! I feel like that was the sign from Jesus, blessing this book. 
 
JK: The Godmother blessing your book! Why taxidermy? 
 
KA: I got very interested in taxidermy because that’s another thing about this place. There are a lot of dead things. 
 
JK: Did you ever interact with people who hunted around here? 
 
KA: My family is extremely Evangelical, very Southern Baptist. A lot of the men in my family are like that. I wasn’t ever allowed to do it though. I had to go to sewing classes once a week. I had to domestic things, which is I suppose why I like to examine that. I got interested in taxidermy too because I saw how much of relationships was just trying to preserve and maintain something, to keep it in stasis, or to hold onto a memory of something. I also like gross things. 
 
JK: Is the book set in Orlando? 
 
KA: It is… we’ll see how it does! It’s coming out June 4th. Arcs are getting sent out next week. I’m going on a tour in support of it. Hoping to do the Miami Book Fair too! I was very specific with the publisher that I wanted to do Florida stuff as much as I could. 
 
JK: Can you talk to me about how the article you wrote for Lit Hub, “The Problem with Writing About Florida”? 
 
KA: Yeah, I wrote that after I read another essay about somebody who came to Florida. 
 
JK: Who wrote that one? 
 
KA: I’m not saying that on record! Nice try! I haven’t had enough beers for that. But yes, after I had read yet another essay by somebody – 
 
JK: Was it in the New York Times? 
 
KA: It was written in a large publication and I did not value it. I feel that a lot of the things I read about Florida are not for people who live here. That’s problematic to me. How I write essays and fiction is there’s usually a question that keeps bothering until I feel like I’m just going to write about it. It doesn’t mean I’m going to answer the question but at least I’ll get out some of the stuff that’s bothering me. I’ve lived here my whole life so germinating about Florida is natural. So many of the things I read about here are written from elsewhere and it’s frustrating, because I feel like they don’t know what they’re talking about or it’s generalizing. You can’t be writing about Orlando and be writing about Miami. You can’t be writing about Miami and be writing about Tallahassee. The state is large! You can’t do that in one essay. If you are trying to do that, then you don’t understand Florida. So, in my article I was trying to unpack this frustration with how other people write about Florida. 
 
JK: I have to admit, I was a little jealous of how well you addressed this issue at first that I couldn’t read it all the way through the first time. Had to come back to it later. 
 
KA: Well, I get it. You have a vested interest in this place, and it feels personal. To me, it felt personal when I read these pieces by people not from here. I felt like, “why do you get to write that?” 
 
JK: Jordan and I are heading into the woods tomorrow to my buddy’s place. A dirt road off a dirt road but only an hour away. 
 
KA: That’s a lot of places here! I tried to capture that in my novel because that’s how Florida feels to me a lot of the time. 
 
JK: I remember in “Locusts” the litter girl runs away to a man-made lake and dreams of snakes. It’s cool how she only has to run down the street to feel wild like that. 
 
KA: For me, Florida feels very much like home and nostalgic but also imminently dangerous. I love going to Paynes Prairie. It’s just outside of Gainesville. It’s a very specifically Florida space. Because you’re arriving into Gainesville and just before you get there is a wild swath of nothing, and there’s wild ponies in there, the biggest fucking alligators I’ve ever seen in my life – alligators that look like they’re the size of a small sedan on the side of the road. I lived in Gainesville for a couple of years. Started at UF then finished at Rollins. But everybody from out of town was always so scared of the gators, like maybe that they’d chase them. The alligator’s not going to chase you. Maybe it’ll eat your dog. 
 
JK: My number one favorite tip I give to newly arrived Floridians is how to run away from a gator!
 
KA: Zig Zag! I love that. A big part of my writing is regionalism and writing about place. Place is as important to me as character. There are writers who do it well and I appreciate them, like Dorothy Allison writes about South Carolina and makes it a main character of that book. Bastard out of Carolinamade me want to be a writer. 
 
JK: What about Florida writers as far as sense of place goes? 
 
KA: Mostly women writers! Lauren Groff, Jaquira Diaz is fantastic, writing specifically about Miami, then there’s also Alissa Nutting, Lindsay Hunter, Sarah Gerard – I’m getting together with her next week. All of them do Florida so well. 
 
JK: I only woke up to the work of Joy Williams recently. John Brandon, the author of Citrus County, recommended her to me at AWP in Tampa last year. What do you think of her? 
 
KA: Joy Williams is a God. I did a weeklong Tin House workshop with Joy. I feel she’s maybe one of the best short fiction writers of the last century. That is my hot take on this. Maybe one of the best short stories I’ve ever read is by her. It’s called “The Ice Skater.” She does so much with so little. I was in workshop with her and someone asked her about editing and granted, this should be not a takeaway for everybody, but she responded with an anecdote, and yes, by the way, she does wear sunglasses all day long every day, even indoors, she’s a fucking badass. Anyways, somebody in the workshop asked her about some edits she wanted to make to her story and Joy just goes, “just throw it away.” She does not edit.
 
JK: How old is Joy Williams now? 
 
KA: I’m not going to guesstimate how old Joy Williams is. She’s infinite! She is a fucking powerhouse. She lives in the desert, doesn’t own a computer, she’s like Mary Ruefle, she doesn’t go on the internet. Joy is insane. She writes beautifully. She is the eminent short story writer. In “The Ice Skater” she wrote the entire story of a family in thirteen pages and it was so good it made me furious, and I loved it. 
 
JK: So, you don’t have those feelings of envy that other writers sometimes have? 
 
KA: I get so excited when I read something good. I just get excited to read, and to read something good? Fuck yeah! Well people are doing good shit? Hell yeah! It has nothing to do with my own work. I’m not competing with anybody. If anything, I’m my own worst enemy. 
 
JK: Jordan and I are in this crazy amazing plot class with Lynne Barrett and she brings this bag of markers and just maps out every story we read in class. 
 
KA: Sam Chang does that kind of shit at Iowa. I had her at Tin House, but she runs the Iowa Workshop. That shit is interesting to me because I don’t even know how I’m doing a story most of the time. It’s interesting to see people who are that involved. I feel like all writers know this though, that our work is subjective. How much of even submitting your work to places is dependent on who the reader is, right? Everybody’s personal preferences come out onto the table. It becomes very weird to me when writing is then put into categories. I was talking to somebody the other day about how they wanted to target their submission to this one place, and I urged them to instead submit it to like, fifty places, because who’s to say that the reader you have simply doesn’t like first person POV, or war stories, or queer stories, and you can’t control that. There’s so much of a gray area. Writing would be so boring if we were able to categorize it in that way. 
 
JK: What was the first story you had published? 
 
KA: It was a story in Superstition Review, which is University of Arizona. It was called “Brotherhood of the Possum” and it’s a story about a brother and sister who find a dead possum in their backyard. It took a long time to get fiction published. From when I started submitting that first story, it took a year. My non-fiction got published first. That was a piece for the Rumpus that Roxanne Gay took. 
 
JK: Well, that’s hitting the ball out of the park on the first pitch. 
 
KA: It funny. The writing processes for both of those mediums is so different for me. When I write essays, I still feel stress and uncertainty, but I also have a better idea of what I’m asking in those. I feel freer to explore the question I’m trying to answer. It feels more like I’m talking myself, which I already do anyway. Whereas with fiction, it feels different. Maybe it’s harder. Non-fiction also gets published on pitch, which is different. Fiction is very often stuck in a slush pile, sadly. You sometimes need to know somebody. But you can’t know somebody until you’ve pushed your way in. It’s kind of a numbers game. Which is I why I told my friend submit everywhere. 
 
JK: Kind of like Jordan on Tinder. 
 
KA: It is! Horrible. I do really well on Tinder, by the way. The dating scene here in Orlando is pretty good. It’s surprisingly good to be a gay lady in Maitland. 
 
JK: Tell us about Maitland. 
 
KA: It’s a small place. We have a brand-new shopping mall called Maitland City Center and it’s adorable. I eye-rolled at that by the way, reader. They’re trying to make it a place for young professionals, living in the condos, walking to the farmer’s market, which is ridiculous because the Orlando area is not walkable at all. Bless their hearts for trying though. 
 
JK: It’s a total manufactured thing. Very Florida. 
 
KA: Right, I talk in that essay about how around here you see a lot of repurposing of space into new hospitality concepts. Places just get wiped out and from our memories. 
 
JK: Do you feel nostalgia for a particular place that’s now forgotten? 
 
KA: Yeah. There was a bar down the street called the Red Fox. Nobody even knows it existed but, do you remember the old SNL sketch with Will Ferrell and Ana Gasteyer as that religious couple playing keyboard?  Those people were real and played at the Red Fox Lounge. It was a weird little hotel and now it’s being turned into a parking garage because it’s across the street from a Trader Joe’s and they needed more parking. There’s a lot of weird gentrifying of things. 
 
JK: Does it ever make you lose faith in the place? 
 
KA: Sometimes, which is sad, because I don’t ever want to leave this place. There have been a couple of places I’ve visited where I was like, “hmm, I can live here,” but they still don’t feel like home. I really like it here. It would take a lot to get me to go but it’s silly to say I’d never go. 
 
JK: I feel the same way about Miami – simultaneous love, hate, and attachment. 
 
KA: Well don’t you feel that way about – oh boy here come my intimacy issues – don’t you feel that way about things you love? Shouldn’t it make you want to die?! Haha. It is difficult to see your personal history erased though.  
 
JK: Is your family still around here? 
 
KA: They are but I don’t have a relationship with them. I don’t speak to anybody in my family. 
 
JK: Would you categorize that as an ok part of your personal history being erased? 
 
KA: Yeah. As I said before, they’re very evangelical and extremely right wing. I cut them off after the election. I’ve made a lot of compromises over the years with them. For example, they didn’t want to acknowledge that I was queer and that I had a partner who was a woman and I let all that slide. But after the election I was done. It’s my fault. There should have been other things that made that happen prior to the election. My dad went to a Pence rally. I should also tell you that I live down the street from them. 
 
JK: And you haven’t run into them? 
 
KA: Haven’t yet! They try to interact with me. They all live here locally. My family is actually fourth generation Floridian. 
 
JK: Do you remember what the first generation did? 
 
KA: What does anybody do here? Plant shit? I don’t know. Probably planted strawberries. 
 
JK: So, when I first reached out to your agent for the interview, I didn’t exactly say “I’d like to take Kristen to the woods” but I said something like, “I’d like to do something very Florida.” I wanted to go on the Yearling Trail in Ocala National Forest. Have you been? 
 
KA: No but I’m very familiar with the work by Marjorie Kinman Rawlings. There’s a line in the movie that I love so much. The little kid yells, “I hate you. I hate you and I hope you die.” I’m very into that line. 
 
JK: I love this place, by the way, how’d you choose it? 
 
KA: Well, I have to admit, I have taken dates here before, but I just like being outside close to my car. 
 
JK: And if it goes well with your date, you live close by. 
 
KA: I’m not taking any dates to my house. I don’t want anybody to know where I live. 
 
JK: Dating is probably a little hard with the book coming out. You’re about to enter into a bit of a whirlwind. 
 
KA: Yeah, I’m definitely not interested in relationships at the moment. There’s a lot of shit going on. I work a forty-hour work week. I have a bi-monthly column at Lit Hub. There’s a short story collection I’m working on. Another novel. 
 
JK: How do you manage to do it? 
 
KA: I just want it badly. I’ve never had the luxury of downtime. These things are important to me so I’m going to make time for it. When I don’t write I feel like garbage. Granted, when I do write, I feel like garbage too. I say “yes” to most opportunities too. 
 
JK: The only traveling you do is for writing then? 
 
KA: Yes. I take the generous amount of days off I’m given and use them for writing. I’m trying to do more leisurely trips, but I also realize now that I can’t not be writing. I need to write every day. 
 
JK: George Saunders calls that feeling “the nun in his ear.” He comes from a catholic background. Do you feel that way too? 
 
KA: Funnily enough, I talked to him about this. We were at a thing together and he asked me if I wrote at work, and I was like “yes, absolutely.” He said he did also, and I was like, “of course you did George Saunders.”
 
JK: When I google you, somebody else comes up? 
 
KA: Yes. Kristen Arnett, green makeup, healthy beauty expert, and she is killing it. She drinks way more water than me. She’s super healthy. She eats way more vegetables. There’s no worry she’ll get scurvy. She’s a democrat. So, hell yeah. 
 
JK: Scurvy? Do you not engage in any sort of wellness activity? 
 
KA: HAHAHAHAHAHA. My whole shtick is I go to 7/11 every night. I’ve eaten whole pizzas there. I’m there so often that I have to let them know if I’m leaving town more than a few days. Wellness?