AN INTERVIEW WITH KATHERINE VONDY
By Caleb Berer
Katherine Vondy, whose story “There’s a German Compound Word for Everything” appears in this issue of the magazine, is a writer, playwright, and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. I recall being struck first by the title of her story—is there not, after all, a German compound word for everything?—and then utterly seduced by its opening paragraph, which amounted to what W.G. Sebald once called “the very careful page of prose.” By the end of the second page, I suspected (barring some unforeseen writerly catastrophe) we’d be publishing the piece, and by the end of the third page I had resolved on an interview. My esteem for the writer only grew as I read whatever else I could find, some of which is referenced in our conversation (“The Birds of New Mexico” appears in The Iowa Review, and “Employee Discount” appears in Briar Cliff Review). Her short fiction has appeared in a wide and excellent range of magazines, and her films have been screened at festivals around the world (for a fuller picture, see her author bio, or visit her website). She is also a member of The Vagrancy, an award-winning, not-for-profit theater company in Los Angeles. In our discussion below, which has been edited for length and clarity, we cover the art of the sentence, the often complicated relationship between the author and the first-person, and, naturally, the unvarnished misery of Dmitri Karamazov.
INTERVIEWER
You have such wonderful sentences. They are precise, musical, and often quite funny. Given their sensibility, not to mention the dominant motif (German compound words), I was instantly reminded of the great German-language writers, Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald, though you’ve said neither these writers are major influences on you. Could you talk a little bit about your approach to the sentence? How does one begin, take shape? When it comes to the art of the sentence, who are the writers that move you?
KATHERINE VONDY
I think my approach to sentences is mostly instinctual; I wish I could speak more cohesively about how I form sentences, but I don’t think I’m entirely clear on how the process works, myself! I can say that, when I’m in a good creative frame of mind, it feels more like the sentences are coming from someplace that isn’t entirely me, and writing isn’t a wholly conscious activity. It feels a little bit like a slight fugue state in which I’m somewhat disconnected from the actual work, and am not aware of myself as the writer. When I’m in a less-good creative place, it’s sadly a much more laborious process that involves a lot of poking around on thesaurus.com and endless switchings-around of semicolons and em-dashes.
I love Susanna Clarke’s sentences. They’re so effortlessly witty, and they are a joy to read. For example, I think about this line from her book Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell probably more than is healthy: “There is nothing in the world so easy to explain as failure—it is, after all, what everybody does all the time.” It’s a sentence that feels both effortless and surprising, and it lets me know that I’m in the hands of an expert wordsmith.
INTERVIEWER Your story in the issue divides itself into ten discrete sections, each headed by one of the titular German compound words—famously specific constructions, of the sort not to be found in English. Elsewhere you’ve said that saddling oneself with “a particular set of constraints” can actually ease the creative process; was that the case here? How did the words work themselves into the story, and how did the story work itself around the words?
KATHERINE VONDY
My impulse to write this story came entirely from being interested in those compound words, and I had no idea who or what it would be about when I started writing. I started by making a list of the words that felt rich or resonant in some way, then arranged them in an order that evoked a narrative shape to me. From there, I used the definitions of the words as a guide to what would unfold in each section of the story. I do think that, in this case, defining these constraints from the beginning was a handy way to reverse-engineer a plot. It saved me from agonizing over what kind of moment I would need to come up with at any given juncture; the words’ definitions had already decided that for me!
INTERVIEWER
“Compound Word”, “Birds of New Mexico”, and “Employee Discount” seem, in a sense, to be told by sister narrators: three lonely, highly intelligent people, possessed of incisive internal monologues. Two (“Compound”/“Employee”) are wrestling with questions of unmet professional and intellectual potential, while the third (“Birds”) struggles with the isolation brought on by the realization of that potential. The narrator of “Compound” is fascinated by German, which she feels is “capable of expressing so much” more than English; Joanne, of “Birds”, made a career of French and music theory, and it’s through her lifelong relationship to singing that a great deal of the narrative unfolds; the narrator of “Employee Discount”, meanwhile, simply wishes to be a “slightly different” version of oneself. Is there a connection between music, foreign language, and this yearning for the altered self? More generally, what is it that attracts you to these narrators? I know many writers, especially younger writers, find themselves caught on the question of ‘likeability.’ Is that a word you think about?
KATHERINE VONDY
I definitely think there’s something transcendent about music. Music was one of my majors in college, though I never became an especially skilled performer. For me, listening to great music has always made me feel what I can best describe as a sense of possibility—maybe of who I could be or what I could do or what I could understand in the future—that I don’t feel at other times. I’m not sure how universal those specific feelings are, but I do think it’s clear that music has unique capabilities to make people experience strong emotions, above and beyond the emotions of the status quo. I’m also intrigued by foreign languages and sometimes will attempt to incorporate them into my work; for example, I recently wrote a play that was partially set in Medieval England, and one of the fun challenges of that project was trying to find the balance between using enough Old English words that the dialogue evoked a different time period, but not so many that the play was incomprehensible to a modern audience. However, despite being interested in other languages, I’m only fluent in English.
I’m not always totally cognizant of what’s going on with me unconsciously, but perhaps the combination of my interest in but lack of mastery of music and languages is why I felt compelled to create the narrators in the stories you mention. All three of them are written in first person, and maybe that allowed me to aspirationally take on the identities of people who are more accomplished than I am. It’s a credible theory!
Honestly, I’m pretty baffled by the idea of ‘likability.’ To me, a character is likable if they are interesting, and it’s difficult to wrap my mind around the idea that readers or viewers might dismiss a story if they, for example, wouldn’t want to be best friends with the main character. It means missing out on one of the great benefits of stories, which is that they allow us to get to know various kinds of people without having to actually have them in our lives! I’ve never asked myself whether a character I’m creating is likable, and I think it does a disservice to all creative art forms when likability is equated with merit.
INTERVIEWER
Building on that previous question: you’ve said that your creative work is a sort of shortcut a stranger might take towards knowing you. Could you talk a little about what you see as the relationship between the author and the first-person?
KATHERINE VONDY
I get the sense that the arts world is in an interesting place right now where the trend is to look at a work of art as if it’s inextricably intertwined with the identity of the artist. This has always been something people thought about, of course, but I think it’s especially prevalent right now. It can have both positive and negative repercussions: on the positive side, it can make the experience of the artwork richer for the viewer to understand something about the person who created it. On the negative side, it can start to transform the artist into a product, and I think it’s disturbing to think of people in that way.
Sometimes it feels hard to win as a storyteller; on the one hand, if readers think you’re writing something too close to your own experiences, your work will be called navel-gazey, but on the other hand, if readers think you’re writing something too far from your own experiences, your work will be called inauthentic. The potential scrutiny of who you are in relation to your story can really start to get in your head, and make it hard to feel confident in your work. As far as my feeling that reading my writing is a way of knowing me, it’s less about me writing characters who are stand-ins for myself, and more that I’m not an especially outgoing, easy-to-get-to-know person. I often fear that people who only know me in a superficial way will assume I’ve got very little going on internally because I tend to be quiet and introverted (especially in large groups). I hope my writing is evidence that I am more thoughtful than I might seem!
INTERVIEWER
In Brothers Karamazov, referring to the miserable Dmitri, Dostoevsky writes: The filthy morass, in which he had sunk of his own free will, was too revolting to him, and, like very many men in such cases, he put faith above all in change of place. If only it were not for these people, if only it were not for these circumstances, if only he could fly away from this accursed place—he would be altogether regenerated, would enter on a new path. Given the strong connections between character and place you’ve drawn in the above-mentioned stories, I was curious to know your thoughts on that idea of place and regeneration.
KATHERINE VONDY
I thought about this idea a lot during the early year(s) of the COVID pandemic, when so many of us had worlds that shrank down precipitously in a very short period of time. In my case, I was suddenly spending a previously unthinkable amount of time in my living room, and even when I was able to leave that space to, say, go on a hike, I was still in the same city, Los Angeles, for fifteen months straight. It was a much more limited sense of place than I’d experienced before, and it reinforced this idea that I’d always sort of vaguely held, but hadn’t defined extensively for myself: that we need different stimuli in our lives in order to have new ideas or to encourage our brains to work in new ways. I think a lot of creative people found it very challenging (amongst the many other challenges of the pandemic) to feel motivated to make new work in a situation of perpetual sameness.
A lot of my ideas have their roots in specific places I’ve lived in or traveled to. I think part of that is practicality—it’s a lot easier to write about something you already know a little about than something you have to extensively research!—but it’s also about a way to continually engage with the wider world, which is something that I think is a positive experience for both the writer and the reader.
INTERVIEWER
“Employee Discount” and “Birds of New Mexico” both end on fairly miserable notes. There is revelation, but no textual suggestion that anything will necessarily improve. “German Compound”, on the other hand, ends with revelation and action—Carrie takes a dramatic step. Yet, the final section of the story, in which this action takes place, is titled “Luftschloss—literally, air castle. An unrealistic dream.” The final sentences bend towards the magical; in fact, the only other place in the story where the language exhibits this tendency is when she is recalling her ‘glory days’ with David, shortly before her episode of “Pure animal rage”. So, firstly, what are we to make of this word, Luftschloss? Does the word “unrealistic” refer to impossibility, or delusion, or is it getting at something else? More broadly: could you discuss your approach to endings? Do the endings of your stories tend to change radically as you revise, or is the tone and shape of the ending generally established in the first draft?
KATHERINE VONDY
I’m very reassured by the ideas you bring up about the ending of “There’s A German Compound Word For Everything” because I have an anxiety about being too saccharine (which is probably why so many of my other stories are such downers). Consequently, I struggled with that ending a lot; I worried that it would feel too easy and too cheesy. Ultimately, I couldn’t come up with any other endings that felt right, so I just went with it. But your observation that the dream is specifically defined as unrealistic is justifying my own choice to me!
Thinking more about what “an unrealistic dream” means in the context of this story, I feel that it leaves a lot of room for whatever comes next for Carrie. It might well be disappointment. It makes me think of that observation (unfortunately I can’t remember who or where it’s from) about how the difference between a comedy and a tragedy might simply be where you decide to end the story. And that makes me feel like the hopefulness at the end of “There’s A German Compound Word For Everything” is a more complicated hopefulness, and somewhat assuages my fear that the ending is too sappy. Thank you for helping me see it that way!
In general, I tend to come up with endings about halfway through the first draft of a story, and then I spend the rest of the first draft trying to connect the dots between what I’ve already written and the conclusion. I don’t revise the general idea of my endings very much, but maybe that’s because I usually don’t start a story knowing how it ends; I just write until the ending is revealed. It’s a fun experience of discovery to write that way, but it’s also at odds with the way a lot of professional writing—especially in the film and TV industry—works, with fully fleshed-out outlines being required at the beginning of most standard development processes. Regrettably, I haven’t yet developed the ability to plan out all the beats of a story before I start writing it so I can deliver a kickass outline before writing a word of the story itself.
INTERVIEWER
In taking a short story from the first word to the final draft, is there a stage you find most challenging? Is there a stage you generally have the most fun?
KATHERINE VONDY
I think the hardest part comes right after I’ve written however many pages or paragraphs I had the initial inspiration to write…and then I have to ask myself: OK, what else? Those first pages or paragraphs are always the most fun for me, because that’s when the story has the potential to live up to my dreams for what it could be. I haven’t yet had the opportunity to ruin it by actually writing it!
INTERVIEWER
In another interview, you mentioned your love of Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise. In the realm of contemporary writers, who else can’t you put down? Do you see the emergence of any exciting trends or themes in contemporary writing?
KATHERINE VONDY
In recent years, I’ve really enjoyed Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle, George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, and Susanna Clarke’s (who I mentioned earlier) Piranesi.
One positive trend I’ve seen in contemporary writing is that I think there is generally a wider acceptance than there used to be of what a “universal story” is. Reading can help us develop empathy for other people, and when we have a more expansive understanding of everything that can be part of the human condition, I think we have the potential to become better people.
INTERVIEWER
Beyond your prose, you’re also a playwright and a writer/director. As the germ of something comes to you, how do you know whether it’ll be a play, a short story, or a film? Have you ever begun something in one medium, only to realize it belongs in another?
KATHERINE VONDY
I think form and content are inextricably intertwined, and in fact, wrote a number of college essays on this very subject. (This is what happens when you habitually wait until 3 AM to start papers that are due in a few hours; you end up falling back on the same idea over and over.) So far, I’ve never started something in one medium and then decided it should be in another, because it seems that the seeds of my ideas always contain some element of how they’ll be executed. If I had to analyze how those distinctions feel to me, I’d say—speaking in very broad generalizations— that if the idea is very visual, then it feels like a film; if the idea has a heightened sensibility of some kind, then it feels like a play; and if the idea is tied up with a particular perspective or point of view that could be expressed best by language, then it feels like a piece of prose.
A mistake that happens a lot in creative fields is thinking that adapting a story from one medium to another is as easy as cutting and pasting. An amazing book won’t necessarily be an amazing film; excellent prose doesn’t always translate to excellent images. There’s definitely a skill to creating a successful adaptation, and I think it isn’t always appreciated or acknowledged!
INTERVIEWER
If you could be best friends with any artist, living or dead, who would you choose?
KATHERINE VONDY
I’m fortunate to already be friends with many amazing artists! Can I answer this question by plugging a few of them? I think everybody should check out Jiehae Park’s plays, Julianne Jigour’s plays, Kristen Havens’s fiction, Eddie Farr’s visual installations, and Andrew Barkan & Polly Hall’s film scores (and their kids’ music, if you happen to have young children in your life!).
INTERVIEWER
What are you working on these days? Do you plan on sticking to shorts, or do you see yourself attempting a novel at some point?
KATHERINE VONDY
I have one completed novel—a YA ghost story—that I’m in the process of querying; please keep your fingers crossed for me that I can stir up some interest in it! Right now, I’m at work on my second novel, and I’m also juggling a few film and theater projects in various stages of development.
