The stories in Kyle Seibel’s wonderful debut collection, Hey You Assholes (out now from CLASH), detail the lives of society’s misfits and weirdos as they navigate life in an increasingly uncertain world. The Masters Review had the privilege of publishing “Master Guns,” which closes the collection, and Kyle was kind enough to discuss the collection and his writing in more detail with Austin Ross.
The journey for you and this book has been interesting in and of itself. Can you talk a bit about how this book came to be? I’d love to hear some of the history of how this particular book ended up with CLASH. Has the book changed at all through this process? Has your relationship to the book changed?
I almost don’t even know where to start. I think if you know anything about this book, you probably know it was originally under contract with a micro press that disappeared overnight because of the mercurial and possible criminal whims of the editor-in-chief. In the resulting hoopla, there was an outpouring of support for the authors who got screwed and through that, I was introduced to an agent. Over the course of a year or so, we submitted the manuscript and received a dozen rejections from mainstream publishers. Honestly, I had begun to lose faith it would ever be a real book when Christoph Paul of Clash Books approached me directly. And really, from our first phone call, everything has happened in a way to confirm that this is the perfect home for the collection.
It’s definitely not the same book that was going to come out two years ago. Some of that is just my development as a writer during that period. Certain stories I considered foundational to the old version did not make the final cut. I think what’s coming out on Clash is a significantly better book.
I read it through, cover to cover early one morning last week. It was the first time I had done that in a while. And I know it’s probably unbecoming to be so cocksure of one’s own creative output, but I stand by it. I like it. I like the stories, and I think it works as a book.
I’d also love to hear a bit about your journey to writing. Was it something you were always interested in? What were your initial inspirations versus who are your inspirations today (or are they the same)?
I came to fiction writing relatively recently. I was working on my first short story the week the pandemic really became the pandemic. But my day job is creative-ish. Or used to be. After getting out of the Navy, I worked as a copywriter at an ad agency in St. Louis for a while. Then, after moving to California for my future wife’s job, I was hired at a tech startup, on their in-house marketing team. That was enough for me for a couple years. I liked the work I was doing. I liked my team. One year, we submitted a bunch of work to a regional ad competition and won a bunch of awards. Best in show, best copywriting, best campaign. And I remember looking at all this work—all of this recognition of my creative energy—and all of it had my company’s name on it. A real moment of reckoning for me. It was a little scary, but it was also invigorating. I came away from the experience determined to make something with my name on it.
As far as my initial inspirations, I really admire how Phil Klay embraces the first person in his collection Redeployment. The ability to convincingly inhabit a voice to where the reader is tricked on a certain level is bewitching. Part of it is craft, I know, but part of it is magic. The title story is a foundational text to me. I’ve always thought George Saunders stories have an almost cyclical completeness to them. That’s something I try to emulate. But I think the author that looms largest for me is Raymond Carver. My introduction to What We Talk About came in the form of a birthday gift from a friend the year I turned seventeen. The stories have meant different things to me over the two plus decades I’ve been reading them, but if there’s something I’ve been struck by recently, it’s that there’s so much humility in his work. There’s violence and addiction and poverty and death, but also this great spiritual discipline as well. I don’t know, maybe I’m talking out of my ass. Simply put, I like stories that when you finish them, you close your eyes and say holy shit. Carver makes me do that more than any other writer.
It might have been “A New Kind of Dan” that really made me sit up and take notice that, holy shit this Kyle Seibel guy is good. I’m curious—maybe just for myself—about how that story in particular came to be, and maybe use that as an entry point into talking about your typical process (if you have a “typical” process).
“A New Kind of Dan” was written as part of a series of stories I was working on at the time about a guy named Regular Dan. The project wasn’t going well. I was stalled out and getting frustrated and so I decided to kill Regular Dan. I was also toying around with writing in the collective first person as a community voice, specifically the voice of the suburb of St. Louis where I grew up. And then this other thing happened as well, where I saw a photo online of a guy who had a terminal illness walking his preteen daughter down the aisle. Then those things kinda swirled around in my head for a couple weeks and then out popped the story eventually.
Typically, once I feel like a story is in a spot that’s not totally embarrassing, I’ll send my drafts to other writers I trust. This particular story (and several others, actually) I sent to Drew Hawkins, who has an extraordinary eye and can interrogate a piece of writing in a way that is very generative, but who is also fundamentally a kind soul. Which is important for first readers, I think.
I don’t know if I have more of a process than that. I tend to write in short bursts that last a couple weeks. Something will get stuck in my head and become a story. Or I’ll read something that really fires me up and I’ll want to try something similar, my version of it. Or I’ll have to write something so boring and generic for work that I’ll take my lunch break to write something purely absurd. Sometimes I wish I had more of a focused approach, but it’s really not much than me sitting at the computer when I get a chance and then bloop bloop bloop out pops the story.
Maybe related, but how do you know when a story is done? What’s your revision process like, and how much do you involve other people in that versus a gut feeling that the piece is ready to be sent out?
I enjoy revising. I’m not too precious about feedback. I like hearing other people’s opinions and perspectives. There’s a creative alchemy in tiny collaborations, I think. Something magic. But there’s also a depth of feeling and complexity that’s only accessible, to me anyway, through disciplined rewriting. And sometimes writing a bad story is more educational than writing a good one. I often feel like I needed to write a shitty story to get to the good one, if that makes any sense.
When it comes to sending stuff out, I’m a guts guy for sure, though my guts are far from infallible. I’ve submitted stories that I feel good about but aren’t fully cooked through and I’ll probably do it again. It doesn’t scandalize me.
What are your writerly dreams/goals/ambitions? They could be something like “I want to win every major literary award in existence” or they could be “I just want to have fun writing.” I always find it fascinating to hear what somebody’s ultimate goals are. Sometimes they can change too, depending on what mood I’m in, but I’m curious to hear where you are on this question at the moment.
My purest ambition for writing is to make something that means something to someone else, something that feels like it found them when they needed it. I’m thinking of what I felt when I first read Arthur Bradford or Winesburg, Ohio or Scott McClanahan. It’s a special connection and I don’t pretend to be close to achieving it. But when I think about what I’m trying to do, what I’m working toward, that kind of singular emotional resonance is my North Star.
This feels somewhat related, but if you could go back in time and tell yourself some piece of writing advice, what would it be? I know you said you came to writing later in life so maybe this could be general life advice to your younger self. I often think about how differently the younger version of me even conceived of the concept of writing and the life of a writer, and I often wonder how I would condense my thoughts into something meaningful for that person at that time. What would you tell your younger self?
Maybe this isn’t advice, but I would tell my younger self to be kinder. Actually, I’d tell my older self that too. But specifically before enlisting in the Navy, I was very conceited and entitled. Starting on the bottom rung in the military will make you humble fast. To tie this back to writing, when you operate from a base of kindness, people are much more inclined to open up to you and then you can pilfer all their weird secrets for your fiction. Half joking. Though part of the kindness thing is listening. I would tell my younger self to listen more. Implied in this advice to be kind and listen is what I really needed to hear which was stop being an asshole and shut the fuck up. Not a coincidence that when I learned to do both those things on a more regular basis, I became a much better writer.
What are you working on now?
I’m not actively working on anything at the moment, which feels good actually. I’m coming off a couple years where I worked endlessly on two novel drafts and getting some distance from those projects has felt healthy. I’ve got a couple short pieces that are close to being finished, but I’m in no rush there either. Really, I’m just hanging out with my wife and dog lately, playing with my kettlebells, and reading as much as I can.
Interviewed by Austin Ross
Austin Ross is a novelist, screenwriter, and essayist. He is the author of the novel Gloria Patri and is a senior editor with HarperCollins, where he acquires and develops a wide variety of nonfiction titles. His fiction and essays have been featured in Publishers Weekly, Literary Hub, and elsewhere, and the film version of his story “The Man for the Job,” for which he co-wrote the screenplay, is in post-production. You can follow him on Twitter @austintross.