A Conversation with Kara Vernor by Joanna Acevedo
Joanna Acevedo: Most of your stories are incredibly short, less than two pages, which is something I really like to see. I'm a big fan of flash fiction. What drew you to flash fiction, as opposed to traditional fiction?
Kara Vernor: I think that it came to me naturally. Some people are just sort of oriented towards different genres. As a kid I would write poetry, not short stories, so I think I always wanted that kind of compression, and especially the emotional compression that you can get in shorter forms. But I spent a lot of time listening to music. I was much more into music than literature for a long time. The framework of a song conveys so much, but also being quite short I think was something that was just in my bones, so I think that's why I was drawn to it. I didn’t discover flash and then start writing flash. I was sort of just naturally writing these short chunks, and as it developed. I discovered flash and thought: that's the best home for what I do.
JA: Can you talk about how this collection kind of came together, and how you began to build the book?
KV: At some point I just felt like I had enough stories, and enough of a thread that ran through them. I didn't set out to create the collection—it’s my first writing in terms of trying to write more seriously—and so what I wanted more than anything was just to keep pushing myself and not do the same thing over and over. So it was actually quite intentionally trying out different voices. And so I think it took a while to sort of see what was there. And it's funny; I remember chatting with John Jodzio, who is a flash writer who I love. And he was sort of like, “Well, what brings your collection together?” and I just said: “Well, pop culture, and misery?” And I hope some humor, too. But I think that's about it. I know that some folks set out to write really tightly contained, cohesive chapbooks. So that's never been my goal. I will get bored if I have to set out to do all, like, magical realism or all fairy tales or whatnot. So I had to kind of write and write and write before I felt like I even understood what it was that linked the stories.
KV: And it’s still not the most linked chapbook out there.
JA: It's interesting what you said about trying different voices, because something that I noticed is you often write in the first person, and I think that you really do have a distinctive narrative voice. So I was interested to ask, who are the women? I think it's almost all women in your collection. And how does that voice affect your storytelling?
KV: I think the women in the collection—I wouldn't call them all naive narrators—but I think that a lot of them are. I think a lot of them do sort of present in that realm. They're hopeful and determined. But at the same time they just keep making these mistakes, their experiences and that naivete lends itself to that tragedy comedy, both sides of the coin flipping from one to the other rather quickly. I really like naive narrators.
JA: These women are mostly looking for something. I kind of picked it out as fulfillment or satisfaction, possibly love, and they mostly meet unfortunate ends. The one I'm thinking of is the one with the boy and the roller coaster. Can you speak to this theme, and how you use irony and humor in your writing to counter that kind of drive for love?
KV: Yeah, sometimes it sort of works out for them. And sometimes it doesn't. But I think that they all kind of want freedom, and they want love, and they want to do things their way. Especially in kind of traditional heterosexual relationships that balance can be really fraught, and they're running into that. They're running into like what they sort of learned and picked up in pop culture about how things are supposed to be in the roles we're supposed to play, and they're coming up against men, usually but not always, but usually, who probably have those tapes playing themselves. And then how do you negotiate that? Especially when you don't necessarily love yourself? And so I think a lot of the women in the collection are also women who are sort of seeking and wanting some validation that they haven't gotten from the world. But they're still hopeful to get it.
KV: I just think that growing up, how do you learn about how you're supposed to be in the world given your set of circumstances: who you are, what you like, your gender, your racial background, your sexual orientation, like all of those things. How are those reflected in the media? And then how do you be in conversation with that or not? And I think there's a lot of really funny sort of opportunities there when you're sort of taking a queue from pop culture in real life, because it's really not real life. For the most part it's really not real life. And so how do you reconcile those two things? What you think you're supposed to be, or how you're reflected? Or sometimes even the art that's important to you? With what's happening in your actual life.
JA: Speaking of the art as important to you, who are some of your influences?
KV: So many influences, lots of musical influences. I wrote a little bit about Jim Carroll, who is a musician and writer, but his spoken word really sort of influenced my writing. He tells these really funny vignettes about his life, but watching him tell a colorful story in a short amount of time stuck with me. But literature-wise, I mean, I got started reading Raymond Carver. I love Raymond Carver for all his faults and everything else. Some of the most influential flash for me was stuff that I read early. So, Kathy Fish. There was a Best Of The Net anthology, I think Matt Bell was the editor of it. So really just reading the breadth of what was out there, and I think some of the weirder stuff, too. There was a journal called LMA that wrote stuff that was a little more avant-garde or abstract a lot of the time and I felt really pushed by that. Stephanie Freele is another writer who I felt very influenced by, and I don't hear people talk about her as much. She’s in my area, so I got to hear her talk, and that’s how I started to learn about getting published.
JA: Another question I had—many of your stories hinge on what in poetry we would call a volta, or a final kind of turn or change in tone. How do you think this turn functions in your work, and why do you think it's so important? Or do you think it's so important?
KV: I don't know if I think it's important. I think I just like it. I like it when I read them, and again it kind of just works with how I think. But I love the idea of an ending that kind of reflects backwards. So you're building the story, and you need all of this forward momentum. Maybe not in every story, but something that I think is really satisfying is when you get to the end. And there's a reflection all the way back. So all of a sudden, you're sort of re-understanding everything that you've read moving forward. And it is in a way, like a flash. I mean, flash is probably an appropriate word. I think there is kind of like an illumination when that happens.
KV: And that's one of the ways to make a story bigger than it is and to get the most that you can out of a very short amount of language is to make sure that the writing is kind of working backwards as it's working forwards. Even if you don't realize that until you get to the end of the piece.
JA: What's next for you? What are you working on? If you’re working on anything? And what are you working toward?
KV: Yeah, that's a good question. I took a job about a year ago that has consumed my life, so I'm not working on all that much right now. And at the same time, I think, stepping back from reading and writing as much as I had been, and the literary community has allowed me the space to reconsider. And I don't know if it's this way in every genre, but for flash, being involved in the online community, it feels almost like a requirement, even though I know it's not. And what I've come to understand is that that hasn't—that doesn't necessarily support my writing. The more I'm involved on Twitter or other things. I've discovered that my writing suffers from it. I really like the literary community that I see in person. I used to put on a reading series. It was super fun. I've volunteered in different capacities with the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, and been on the board in the past. I really like that element and how that works with my writing and makes it feel less isolating.
KV: But in sort of taking a step back, I can't be online as much, because I see how much that sort of takes away, not just in terms of time, but also in terms of a certain kind of thinking and way of being that becomes a norm in the community. And I don't know how to write and not think of my community at the same time. So I'm just kind of dipping my toe back in, really writing more for me when I can, and not stressing at all about publishing. Not feeling like I want to be on that sort of rat wheel. I guess it's the freedom of really having less ambition and actually not trying to get anywhere; like, I just kind of want it to be. I wanted to have a place in my life that feels good and not like a way I measure myself against other people.
Kara Vernor’s tiny fictions have appeared in Ninth Letter, Gulf Coast, The Los Angeles Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere. Some have also been included in The Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, Wigleaf’s Top 50, and the W. W. Norton anthology, Flash Fiction America. Because I Wanted to Write You a Pop Song, her fiction chapbook, is available from Split Lip Press.
Joanna Acevedo is a writer, educator, and editor from New York City. She was nominated for a Pushcart in 2021 for her poem “self portrait if the girl is on fire” and is the author of four books and chapbooks, including Unsaid Things (Flexible Press, 2021), List of Demands (Bottlecap Press, 2022), and Outtakes (WTAW Press, forthcoming 2023). Her work can be found across the web and in print, including or forthcoming in Litro USA, Hobart, and The Adroit Journal. She is a Guest Editor at Frontier Poetry and The Masters Review and a member of the Review Team at Gasher Journal, in addition to running interviews at Fauxmoir and The Great Lakes Review. As well as being a Goldwater Fellow at NYU, she was a Hospitalfield 2022 Interdisciplinary Resident. She received her MFA in Fiction from New York University in 2021, teaches writing and interviewing skills for both nonprofits and corporations, and is supported by Creatives Rebuild New York: Guaranteed Income For Artists.