Monday saw the publication of Kim Ravold’s “Define: Business as Usual,” a runner up in our Featured Flash Contest this year. Today, we’re thrilled to share our interview with the winner! Be sure to read Ravold’s sudden CNF first and then see what she has to say about the experience and her writing and submission process below.
Perhaps this is a bit silly to ask since you noted that this is nonfiction and such an obviously powerful moment, but it’s always my starter question so I’ll keep it: what sparked this story, or led you to write this piece?
I wrote this piece the day after the third not-a-drill lockdown I have experienced. The first one, in high school, was a misunderstanding of a parent entering the wrong door. The second, in college, was an absurd act of racism that led to the SWAT team being called over a glue gun and an art project. In hindsight, the reactions each incident provoked were extreme, and in one case further endangered the students on campus, but even the suggestion of a gun left no room for further clarification. We went into lockdown. We held our breaths. We waited for the time to past. And though each experience held a certain amount of fear in the moment, I still had the ability to look to someone—my teacher, the campus safety alerts, students in the year above me—for some amount of direction. It’s a very terrifying thing to have to discover what a privilege that is.
The incident I write about here happened in October of 2021. Though I was only 24 at the time, a grad student with barely any more authority on campus than the students I was teaching, I was very suddenly the adult in the room, and my students were looking to me to know what to do. It made the normal procedures I was so familiar with—close the doors, shut off the lights—feel even more inadequate than normal, because I had always assumed my teachers knew something I didn’t, or had protocols in place if the situation worsened. I had nothing. My orientation into teacher training was far more concerned with lesson planning and peer-review protocols than with an incident like this. A lockdown drill was never even mentioned. Given that the incident was happening right outside of my classroom window, I figured I should call someone, but I had no idea who, and that might have been the most terrifying thing at all.
I don’t know if my own teachers were more prepared than I was to manage their own not-a-drill lockdowns, but I can’t imagine they were. I can’t imagine there’s anything you can do to properly prepare for that day—and yet, this system asks us to, again and again and again. It felt important to capture this moment, and to underscore what our broken system keeps asking of those who should not have the responsibility to answer.
Maybe this is me not reading widely enough (that’s always the right answer, just read more, ainnit?), but I don’t feel like I encounter much flash nonfiction, and so when I do encounter it I always find myself reading it excitedly and wishing I saw it more. I wonder if you could talk a bit about how you feel those two styles serve one another?
One of my writing mentors once said that you can get away with more in nonfiction than you can in fiction, that coincidences feel more coincidental because they aren’t contrived. When you combine that with the compression that flash demands, the result is blunt facts and raw emotion. If someone had asked me to critique a story where the Computer Science Department announced a grant of millions of dollars right after a campus lockdown had ended, I might have flagged that as just a tad unrealistic. I almost didn’t believe it myself, but it was one of the first emails I received after the all clear. I hope that the constraints of the flash form leave the reader with more space to feel that same uncanny disbelief that I did.
The essay stops in a perfect place, particularly for flash with its extreme focus on the moment itself, but I’m invested as hell, so: How did the rest of that semester go? Honestly, is there any way to come back from that and still just have normal lessons and the like?
This happened on a Tuesday, and I didn’t have anything on campus on Wednesday. Our next class would have been Thursday. I had previously scheduled independent peer-review, so we didn’t meet, but I had a workshop of my own to attend, and I drove in early to get some work done. I honestly thought I was okay about the whole thing—not “fine” because things like this are never fine—but that I had processed and compartmentalized and was ready to move on with the semester. As soon as my car crossed onto campus property, my hands started shaking again. They didn’t stop for the whole day. Instead of getting work done like I had planned, I sobbed in my office for hours.
When our class resumed the following Tuesday, I came with a few slides about how we might better respond to an emergency, and a link to the university website that spelled out those same procedures. It, again, felt woefully inadequate, but my students seemed to take it in with the same sort of bored apprehension I might have if I was in their place, believing there would always be an adult in the room to handle the details. I think that a trauma like this results in a shared delusion that business as usual is even possible. I think it’s the only way we can continue in the face of repeated inaction.
I did reach out to one of my own professors to see if there were more resources I could send to my students. I received the same link to the campus counseling that I had already sent them for services that were already overwhelmed from the strain of COVID. I’m still angry that the university didn’t have more to offer us.
Eventually, I found out that the unknown armed person was there because he was seeking help during a mental health crisis. He had called the medical center to let them know he was coming, and he let them know he had a gun because he was afraid of hurting himself. It was another misunderstanding, and that he was led away in handcuffs is yet another injustice.
I don’t think I ended up going to the Halloween party. I did eventually remember my tea.
I’m that annoying guy at the reading that always wants to ask the super-cliché questions, so apologies in advance for these next two. First, can you tell us a bit about your writing routine? (mornings with coffee pecking at the keys; ten hours in front of a keyboard every day; chunks when inspiration strikes, et cetera?)
These days I’m balancing my writing with a day job, so while I long for the times where I could go for ten hours straight, my writing lately has been happening more in fits and starts, like a buffering video. One thing that hasn’t changed is the value that a good writing community brings to my routine. Every week or two I’ll meet with some writing pals and we’ll put some pages in. It’s nice to remember that creative work doesn’t exist on its own, that it has to be in dialogue with the world around you and the people within it.
And the story process itself: are you a seventeen drafts before even your first reader sees it kind of writer, or does it all flow brilliantly to fountain pen on first thought without stopping (someone someday will reply yes to that, I’m sure), or do you write a single sentence a million times until it’s perfect, or…?
When I’m doing my best work, writing feels like playing in a sandbox. Like I’m a kid again, and I can build the tallest castle in the world. It has to be fun, even if the content I’m writing isn’t, because otherwise I don’t think I could bear it. I find that the main ideas or themes might come out in mostly-whole pieces in the first draft, but I’ll spend hours fiddling with the sentences to get them exactly right. It’s unstructured, and often feels unproductive, but if at the end of it I can walk away from something that stands on its own, I’m happy.
Would you talk a little bit about your overall submission process for this piece? I’m always curious about the journey a piece has taken to publication.
I wrote this piece the day after the incident, and then did some light editing the week or so after. I didn’t want to change anything after that. The piece had felt so charged with energy when I wrote it, and it was important to me to preserve that. I didn’t want to end up editing my own memory. I’m very happy it found a home here, and in its original version.
I sent it lots of places, and it made the final round of reading multiple times. Every time, I received a note that it just “didn’t fit” the issue the editors were compiling, and they were bummed to have to let it go. After several kind rejections, I figured a contest that wasn’t curated around a specific theme would be its best shot. The word length fit. I sent it off.
In some ways, I understand why it was rejected so many times. Gun violence shouldn’t be made to fit where it doesn’t belong, and it doesn’t belong anywhere, but our reality doesn’t reflect that, and so our writing shouldn’t either. In the time since I first wrote this piece, there have been hundreds of similar scenes with much worse endings. This year alone, more than fifty. Most Americans support gun control measures that would reduce incidents of school and other mass shootings, and yet, here we are, holding our breath until the next one, closing our eyes when the headlines roll in.
Interviewed by Brandon Williams