Kimberly Blaeser’s “Leaving Paradise” won first prize in our 2024 Summer Short Story Award for New Writers. First, read her terrific story. Then check out this interview below, where she talks about the importance of storytelling and how being a poet influences her prose.
This piece feels so voice-driven to me, although it’s also deeply rooted in place. I’m curious if one came before the other or if both the voice and the setting arrived as one.
I heard the voice first (maybe for years), and the voice felt tied to a specific place and time—and to specific circumstances. Of course, the narrator is a young girl, but other qualities of her voice like cadence or vocabulary owe a lot to the story’s setting in a rural reservation community in the Northwoods. I think the tension of “Leaving Paradise” arises partly from the fluctuation of the narrator’s voice and stance between naiveté and pragmatism. Throughout the writing, I rooted for her, hoping difficult events or circumstance would not prevent her from holding on to a little optimism.
I read in your bio that you’re a poet, and that doesn’t really surprise me because your writing is so lyrical. How does the process of writing prose differ for you? What are the similarities?
Though in both prose and poetry I tend to follow the energy of the piece rather than have a predetermined outline or outcome, I find that fiction tends to turn more often in directions I haven’t expected, to surprise me in the writing. This may happen because characters, even if we have “authored” them, remain unpredictable, maybe even untamable. So, for me, fiction requires more problem solving and reimagining as the plot develops.
In both genres, I am also tuned to the sound—of the line, the rhythm, the voice. I read out loud as a way of reentering the piece when I am returning to it. In poetry that means I can generally read the whole poem before revising or continuing. In fiction, though I try to rely on the last few pages to help me back into the process, because prose works tend to be longer, maintaining continuity often requires a deeper dip into what has already been written, which means more prep time in each writing session.
This feels, among other things, to be a tribute to family matriarchs. Was that always the intention, or was it something that emerged through the writing?
Because women have played important roles in my own life, I often lean into their stories. Since this particular story opens with the narrator and her cousins living at their grandma’s, I expected it might offer some literary homage to matriarchs. I didn’t perhaps know that caregiving more broadly would come to the fore as it does in the sister/cousin relationships, the community members various acts of support, etc. The larger role the grandmother plays in the outcome of the plot definitely emerged in the writing. I loved that she stepped in the way she did!
As a writer I am, of course, charmed by the thread through this piece about the importance of stories. Can you talk a little about why you feel stories are important?
I grew up with marvelous storytellers who could make anything from a dramatic hunting trip to a simple encounter with a neighbor entertaining. Well told stories mark us. The back and forth telling among family or friends creates bonds. We remember and retell one another’s best tales. We reimagine the ghost mule every time we drive on highway 6.
But stories in my experience are utilitarian and well as entertaining. When my relatives shared family and tribal stories they emphasized our responsibility to carry them forward because our cultural traditions, teachings, and values are embedded in Indigenous stories. Through trickster stories, for example, we learn to use humor as a survival tool. Some stories relay important information or lessons about subsistence activities like fishing or wild ricing. Put in a story, the information is more readily retained. Like memory, stories can also console when we experience loss, or empower us with recollections of someone else’s courage. Need to take on the city council? Someone in the family has already done that and left a blueprint—in a story.
For me, listening to storytellers or reading stories has always felt like a gift. I often say we become the stories we tell. We become the people and places of our past because our identities are made of them.
Tell me a little about your writing process. Do you write every day? Just when inspiration strikes?
I keep journals and tend to start or draft many pieces there. Or I find snippets in the journals that I cull as I realize they might come together in a story or poem. Also scattered throughout my journals is the acronym WSED which stand for Write Something Every Day. When I am uninspired, I use that four-letter heading to give myself permission to write badly. It excuses me if things don’t go well. But, more importantly, it gets me started. In reality, I write or record something most days. In the long run, the practice I do in spare moments keeps the tap on for the big writing days.
My writing process also often involves finding or going to a writing spot away from distraction. In summer and fall when we are at our cabin, I often take a journal, my camera, coffee, and a lunch, hop in the kayak and paddle in to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Exercise and solitude feed my creativity. I also prime my writing pump, by reading. Sometimes I actually take an epigraph from a text, but other times the atmosphere of a scene inspires me or a particular word haunts me in a way that builds into something
Inspiration is partly chance in writing—what tumbles in your mind in sleep, what you overhear in a restaurant, the strange story on the news, etc. But, paying attention and getting a thread down remains a key part of the whole process for me.
Interviewed by Jen Dupree