KB

I want to start out by talking about your book Aliens and Anorexia. There's this beautiful line that you wrote about the artist Paul Thek's work 96 Sacraments, where you describe it as “a record of a person's effort to transcend boredom and invest daily life with weight, to experience both gravity and grace.” Later, while reflecting on both Thek’s work and your own life, you say that “belief is a technology, a mental trick for softening the landscape. The world becomes more sensuous and beautiful when God is in it.” Have you found that through writing? Have you been able to invest your own life with weight or God or transcendence?

CK

I don't think that happens through writing particularly. It happens through other ways. But what I wrote then, I would still stand by. That it's the act of believing that transforms things. Which is such a goofy and improbable thing to do, because we're all too smart to believe in things. We know all the evidence to the contrary.

Someone whose book influenced me a whole lot is Fanny Howe. She's an incredible writer. And she's a Catholic, against all probability. She's just one of the most intelligent writers and people that I've ever met. She has a deep sense of politics and racial justice. But she identifies as Catholic, and that's often the subject of her work. So I was thinking of Fanny and then Paul Thek's own religious conversion, which was similarly an act of hope and will, against any evidence to the contrary. That time in his life when he started spending time in monasteries with the Benedictine monks—he even thought about becoming a monk himself. I was making the movie Gravity and Grace, which Aliens and Anorexia is about. Gravity and Grace was actually adapted from an anthropology classic of the 1950s, called When Prophecy Fails. It’s about a flying saucer cult group in the American Midwest, and what happens to people if they invest all this belief in something, and then the belief is completely shattered. So I was thinking a lot about belief and what it does for people.

KB

Is belief necessary, for both living and creating?

CK

At times in your life, I think probably, yes. And at other times in your life, a piercing clarity and realism might be the better thing.

KB

Are you religious or spiritual?

CK

No. I'm not, but I meditate. But that has nothing to do with a deity. I used to go to Zen centers, and there's not one that's convenient to me now. So Vipassana meditation has turned out to be more convenient to where I am. Most days I try to meditate for a short amount of time. It's the same as exercising, or an extension of exercising. But what we were just talking about—belief versus realism and clarity, and how both are good at different moments in your life—applies to the book that I've just finished writing. It’s a book of realism and clarity. That's what I was really pursuing in this book.

KB

What is this book about?

CK

It’s called The Four Spent the Day Together. I haven't published excerpts from it, but I’ve done studies towards it for Broadcast at Pioneer Works. I researched a crime in Hibbing, Minnesota that happened in January 2019. I got interested in the crime because I was living up there at the time. My then-spouse Philip and I had a house in northern Minnesota. He was living there full time, and I was going back and forth between teaching in LA. I knew the area very well, but I didn't know the life and the town so well because we had a cabin out in the woods—we were there for the lakes and the eagles and the timberwolves. But life in the town is very difficult and meth-ridden. The culture of this town and others like it have just been eviscerated in the years since, which I’d date back to Reagan. So I got very interested in this, and the third part of the book is exclusively about the crime. I interviewed the three teenagers involved, who kidnapped and shot an acquaintance in the woods at 3:00 in the morning at close range after spending thirty-six hours together. Initially, it was the durational aspect of the kidnapping that hooked me. What were they doing during that time? Well, they were getting high and crashing, getting high and crashing again. It wasn’t that psychologically intricate. But I got to know the kids, their families, their friends, their teachers, the police, the public defenders, the prosecutors. Everybody.

I did probably over a hundred interviews, over two summers researching the crime. That's just the third part of the novel. The first part of the novel concerns my family and my childhood in the Bronx and in a blue collar town in Connecticut, called Milford. The second part of the novel concerns our move to the cabin in Balsam and my partner's addiction and struggles with addiction, which continues on from my last novel, Summer of Hate. The character names are the same. Catt and Paul.

The Four Spent the Day Together skips over two or three generations of working class American history, from my parents’ very aspirational generation, which I inhaled growing up, to Paul, who is half a generation younger than Catt and has a more checked-out attitude towards reality in general. And then, the Minnesota kids who are in their teens and have never known anything but chaos— multi-generational addiction and poverty. It's a different brain. So much social commentary about these issues assumes that the kids think and react in the same ways as the commentators themselves. It’s very bizarre. The missing link is to believe that people are the same. It’s a very solipsistic form of empathy: imagining how you would feel, facing the same circumstances. But you wouldn’t be you! You’d have a completely different response, if you grew up in chaos, medicated for ADHD, eating only fast food and moving eight times a year—it’s a completely different reality structure.

I read so much about current social policy regarding these issues and it's very interesting to me. It comes from a place of pretending that the brain structure of these kids is the same as the policymakers. It's very bizarre. To me, the missing link is that a lot of progressive social work policies seem to go from the assumption that people are the same. It's a misplaced empathy, seeing yourself in those physical circumstances. But it wouldn't actually be yourself; you would have a completely different brain. Having grown up from your earliest memories being complete chaos, moving eight times a year, to facing food insecurity, housing insecurity, and angry, addicted people everywhere you look. It's a different reality structure entirely.

And so always when I'm writing now—especially since I started writing about other people more—I'm really trying to see things from the character's point of view, not my point of view. I'm trying to jump behind their head, their mouth, their face, and see things through their eyes. So that was really a stretch and that was what I was trying to do, to psychically penetrate the mindspace of these kids and how they see things.

KB

Did you find that you were able to do that successfully, to completely enter that mindspace of someone else?

CK

Not so much because of my own efforts, but I think through talking to their friends and parents. I’ve become very friendly with one of the three kids, the accomplice, and we email regularly. I've helped him out a little bit and I'm trying to help with the case as well. The police also gave me this great trove of recovered text messages exchanged over the course of the kidnapping. And looking at all their social media—they're in prison, but their social media pages are all still up—and piecing everything together. I have gotten a better sense. I did the same thing with the kids as I did in the Kathy Acker biography, After Kathy Acker, which I think is what everybody does if they're writing a biography: the first thing is the timeline.

The discipline and the structure of the timeline is so helpful. Because if you start to place things that happen in the day in their right order, then you start to see possible causalities or links between the things. Whereas before nothing made sense. If you put things in their time-based chronological order, you start to see possible connections. This led to this, and so on. Of course, this is a thing that the kids cannot do, nor can their parents. If you're living in chaos, you can't remember six hours ago, let alone six months ago. It's all just a big blur. The language of the police reports is completely time-based. But they don't tell you what you most want to know—which is what people were thinking while they did those things. If you put it all together it starts to form a picture.

KB

Why do others figure so prominently in your autobiographical work, and where does the impulse to biographize people, with so much intent and detail, come from?

CK

That's kind of the basis of writing, isn't it? If you're writing, you're investigating things, you're looking a little deeper than people look in the course of an anesthetized daily life. The pleasure of reading is that the writer has looked that far and is telling you things that you either didn't know or you knew in some subliminal way, and they’re helping you bring it to the surface. The function of writing is to give thoughts and feelings a voice, and to bring them forward to articulate them. So that means writing means looking at things very hard.

With my first novel, I Love Dick—I didn't know I was doing it at the time, but that's what I was doing with my own experience. It was conscious on some level, of course, because I said “Okay, I'm gonna make a case study of my life.” So after I made a case study of my own life, I thought, “Well, time to move on to other people.”

KB

In many ways, your work transcends the singular “I,” though you usually write in the first person. Have you found that through these explorations and investigations of other people, like Kathy Acker, Simone Weil, and Ulrike Meinhof, you’ve discovered things about yourself? Almost through living by proxy of them?

CK

Oh, yes. Isn't that a wonderful thing? That's why we have heroes, because they’re parts of ourselves amplified—and then we're perfect. There's nothing better than writing from the place of a fan. There's nothing wrong with being a fanboy or fangirl, to inhale the spirit of somebody else's life and work and let it take you someplace. We are all composites of the people that influence us the most deeply. The more interesting things you can seek out to put yourself around, the more interesting your life becomes.

KB

Prior to becoming a published writer, you were a filmmaker. Taking account of the artist you’ve become since that time, I'm curious if you would have any interest in foraying into that world again—or even performance work, which I know you did in your twenties.

CK

If there were an opportunity to do some kind of performance work, I think I'd be very interested in that. Film not so much, because unless it's something you shoot with your cell phone or a small experimental personal film, the logistics of it are just so overwhelming and outside of my orbit at this point. So I can't imagine that happening, but a performance, yes, that would be deeply interesting. A performance in a theater is more interesting than performance in a gallery, because usually in gallery performances, it's the action rather than the acting that's important, and it's the acting that interests me.

KB

Somewhat related to performance, Eileen Myles has described the transcendence you achieve in writing through performing your dexterity as an editor, which they wrote about in the introduction for I Love Dick. They say, “Chris really knows how to edit, which is the best performance of all, to go everywhere in a single work and make it move.” Do you feel that you embody a certain voice when you're editing or when you're writing? How so? 

CK

They're different. When I'm editing, I try to become someone's most perfect reader. Kind of understanding exactly where it's coming from, what they're trying to do, what the best version of that text or that book can be. That comes very naturally, because I've always been such a reader. Writing, of course, is different. It's harder, because you have to make it up yourself. If you're editing, it's all given. You're stepping into somebody else's space kind of luxuriating in that. And if you're writing, you have to create your own.

KB

I’d like to discuss your role as an editor more. Your Semiotext(e) imprint, Native Agents, has really taken on a life of its own, having most recently published titles by Sasha Frere-Jones and Natasha Stagg, alongside Eileen Myles and Cookie Mueller. Can you tell me about your thinking when you first proposed the series in 1990, as well as your current goals?

CK

Well, it's no longer my imprint. When I first started it, it was. My goal then was A, to publish my friends, and B, to create a part of Semiotext(e) that would be more American, more female, more contemporary. It was very contemporary on a level of theory, but that would reflect contemporary fiction and contemporary poetics, and actually be more female and queer than the theory list. So that succeeded. The writer Hedi El Kholti joined the press in 2001 and started working full-time as Managing Editor 2004. At that point, we collapsed the editorships of the series, and the three of us became co-editors of the entire list.

Hedi brought so much to the fiction list. He was born in Morocco and lived in France, and he's completely on top of what's being published in France, and also in Morocco and North Africa. He brought on Abdellah Taïa; that was one of the most exciting earlier acquisitions. We were the first to publish Taïa's work in English, and we had several projects with him. Hedi also had this interest in out-of-print queer theory from France in the '70s, so Semiotext(e) started publishing works by Tony Duvert, Hervé Guibert and Guillaume Dustan. Hedi is pretty much responsible for reviving the reputation of those writers and their work circulating again so much. It's really quite wonderful.

What Sylvère [Lotringer] did for French theory, Hedi seems to have been doing for a strain of queer fiction writing from France. The first early autofiction. When people started talking about autofiction in the US they were really not factoring in the whole lineage of these French writers. The Guillaume Dustan books are so hilarious and wonderful, and he's such a close cousin of other American writers that we’ve published like Gary Indiana.

KB

Are there people in your life who you turn to as a sounding board, or editors that you continually work with for your own writing?

CK

I definitely read other people's work and respond to it. There are people I turn to who are important first readers for my work. Hedi has always been a first reader. But other friends, like the writers Estelle Hoy and Jennifer Kabat have been sounding boards too. Because they share a lot of these interests, they've been important people to talk with. And then some writer friends in Mexicali too.

KB

How has your experience as an editor, and working with the authors that you've championed, informed your life's work?

CK

Inhaling the essence of other people's work. Because you have to take a really deep breath to be able to respond to the person. I've inhaled so much of so many people's work. Early on I remember Shulamith Firestone’s Airless Spaces and how exciting that was. Fanny Howe's Indivisible was another great early one. And Eileen, of course. The very first book of Eileen’s that we did was pre-scanning. I typed the whole manuscript into the computer and I still remember some of the poems from Not Me by heart. Ann Rower also, whose book, If You're a Girl, we are redoing as an expanded edition. I copied her so much when I first started writing. She was such an enormous influence. She's like a female William Burroughs.

KB

I was reading an interview of yours from 2017 where you describe Kathy Acker's process of embodying a distinct authorial voice. You called it “ghosting” other writers, which I found to be a fascinating term because I didn't realize that's always what I've done in my own work—that is, attempting to energetically channel whoever it is I’m reading or studying at that moment, through my voice. I've just never been able to articulate it.

CK

Isn't that funny? It's like, even if nobody else knows it. I always feel like I'm doing it to a certain writer. As I'm working on a part of a book, I'm very much writing under the influence.

KB

Going back to what you said about being a composite of the people around you, do you find it's the same kind of influence with writing? By inhaling these works they are metabolized, and become your own voice?

CK

It's hard to imagine how people write without being huge readers. I mean, where else could it come from?

KB

There is this wonderful Deleuze quote which you’ve referenced, where he says that "Life is not personal." You were discussing using the material of your own life as the primary source for writing. Where would you locate this drive to directly wield your life as the basis for your work? How do privacy and transparency figure into this?

CK

Because that's what I know the best. I am always very transparent about things. I don't know why things are private. I mean, sexual things, of course. We think it's sexual things that warrant the most privacy, but money is actually a greater taboo than sexuality. People are very sensitive about that. I always felt that as somebody who entered the culture world from a working class background that it was my job to be as transparent as possible about how I did it, because there are many people who are living as artists who don't have a job they have to go to. They're free to go to coffee dates and lunches and drinks and studio visits and what-have-you. And they'd like people to believe that it's on the strength of their work, that somehow their work is garnering this financial and critical support. In fact, it's not. It's because they're lucky enough to have other sources of income. That makes people who don't have that feel terribly inadequate, as if their work is not as good or they are doing something wrong. So I think it's very important that people be extremely transparent about how things are and how things come to be.

I don't hate people for having money. I mean, you couldn't be in the art world if you had resentment about that, because there are a lot of people who are fortunate enough to have access to resources. But with that good fortune, I think people also ought to be transparent about it.

KB

In the past few decades, we’ve seen a moral affront to the protection of personal privacy, which can be both good and bad, depending on the context. In your lifetime, you've seen the rise of social media and the complete inverse of that privacy with the creation of online profiles. You’re not only laying your life bare, but also selectively fictionalizing and narrativizing yourself. But then again, what isn’t fiction? 

CK

The social media part is not really very personal, is it? I just found this amazing Baudrillard quote the other day. May I read it to you? It's about reality television. The end of his life dovetailed with the very beginning of reality television—“Big Brother,” “The Loft.” So he wrote about that:

“What people deeply desire is a spectacle of banality. The spectacle of banality is today's true pornography and obscenity. It is the obscene spectacle of nullity, insignificance, and platitude. This stands as the complete opposite of theater of cruelty, but perhaps there is still a form of cruelty, at least a virtual one, attached to such banality. At a time when TV and the media in general are less and less capable of accounting for the world's unbearable events, they rediscover daily life. They discover existential banality as the deadliest event, as the most violent piece of information, the very location of the perfect crime. Existential banality is the perfect crime. And people are fascinated but terrified at the same time by this indifference, nothing to say or nothing to do, by the indifference of their own lives. Contemplating the perfect crime, banality is the latest form of fatality. It has become a genuine Olympic contest. The latest version of extreme sports.”

KB

How do you feel about the reception of your work?

CK

All of my novels have been better received years, sometimes decades, after their first publication. I don’t know why this is. I’ve never had a commercial machine behind my work, setting the stage and paving the way for how they’ll be critically read. By publishing with Semiotext(e), they’ve been able to find their way over time to their best readers. That’s true of a lot of the books that we publish. Didier Eribon’s Return from Rheims became more widely read in the wake of his close younger contemporary, Edouard Louis. Hedi has been very insistent about keeping all of the Semiotext(e) books in print. The books on our list resonate with each other in all kinds of interesting ways, creating a context.

KB

In Aliens and Anorexia you write about the contradiction of male universality versus the singular, interior oneness of femininity. Is using the direct material of your own life a gendered expectation for women artists and writers? 

CK

I think that's much more a twentieth-century phenomenon. I don't think that's true so much now. The twentieth-century American Western fiction idea was that the man would write the great big book—the Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer kind of book—and the woman would write the Margaret Drabble interior, domestic life type-book. But people don't live that way so much anymore. Everything is more individual and fractured and it's pretty gender-equal at this point. The distribution of women and men, people of all genders, writing about contemporary geopolitical topics. In the world of fiction, we've really lost that dichotomy between the big universal book and the small domestic book. I don't really see that so much anymore in contemporary fiction. Contemporary fiction is a matter of both things. The writers that I like the most have that sense of minute detail together with a larger sense of the things that determine and inform that detail outside of the room, what's inside the room and what's outside the room affecting it.

KB

Has fourth wave feminism’s entanglement with neoliberalism set women back, specifically in relation to MeToo and cancel culture? Do you think it’s possible for things to change for the better? And what does “better” mean for you?

CK

I think we've learned that we can't talk about women as a block. Any more than we could talk about Americans or Californians and just as we can't talk about feminism as a block. There are so many kinds, so many different feminisms, it's much more useful to parse them out. Ecofeminism was a great development in the last decade. That interests me really a lot. And thinking about ways that values that came out of the feminist movement can be applied to other concerns. MeToo was a great final purge of some of the permissions that used to be granted for violating, aggressive behavior, especially in professional situations. That kind of behavior is just not on the table anymore. Which is great. That's a welcome change, but the rest of it, I don't know. I mean, what does fourth wave feminism even mean at this point? How would you even identify it? It's so nebulous.

KB

You’ve pushed back on the label of autofiction regarding your work. What does that genre identifier mean to you?

CK

Well, can we just not even use that term? [Laughs]. I mean, Constance Debré, have you read her wonderful books that we've been publishing? Autofiction doesn't really describe it. She's not writing an autobiography. She's writing fiction. And the presence of the author is...can we talk about Herman Melville? Can we talk about Moby-Dick? Is Moby-Dick autofiction? You could say that it is. The writer is always somewhat present in the work. No matter how transposed or how literally, the writer is present. That's what makes it a literary text. It's fine with me what other people say. People can have their own taxonomies, and they make sense for them. But in terms of how I describe things for myself, it's not useful for me.

KB

Do you find it limiting, or reductive?

CK

Yes. Because a writer wants everything. A writer wants the whole world. That is, if you didn't want everything, why would you go to all the trouble of shutting yourself in a room for so long?

KB

You're asked to speak about I Love Dick a lot. What are you not asked about enough? 

CK

I wish people would talk more about form, about influences, and about my decision to talk so explicitly about money—a concern that was central within nineteenth-century fiction but then became completely taboo.

KB

So much of the reflection that goes on in your writing is profoundly aware of the world around it, and is very much rooted in history. In a 2006 conversation with Gary Indiana for Purple, you said, “I've never experienced a separation between the historical and the personal.” That's very apparent in your work—especially in Torpor with the character of Jerome, where he’s carried through his experiences being a hidden child during the war and surviving the Holocaust, into his marriage with Sylvie. There's something to living in and amongst history, especially in a time that individual experience is overemphasized. Do you find that people are living ahistorically now, or without some greater connection to tradition, belief, or meaning? 

CK

The book that I just finished, The Four Spent the Day Together, is trying to get at that question in some way through understanding the culture of these kids. And people can't really live in a vacuum. They have to create something where there's nothing. These kids really do not have any culture beyond media culture, they don't have any tradition, so they invent it. They’ve mostly grown up in foster care, and create their own families with their friends. They call each other sister, brother, cousin, nephew, and create a mock family structure. And they’re all into Nordic tattoos. A million years ago there was a Scandinavian heritage in northern Minnesota, forgotten now except for these tattoos, which gives people a sense, however false, of their roots. As one of the kids said to me, “It's better to be something than to be nothing.”

KB

Have you always been interested in the true crime genre, or investigative writing? Or did you discover this interest while living in Minnesota?

CK

I love reading true crime books. Gary Indiana's Three Month Fever, Norman Mailer’s The Executioner's Song, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Those are all amazing books. But no, I first read about the crime in the local paper while I was up there. I was at a loss for what I was going to do next or work on. And I was like, “Holy shit, that's a book.” And who up here is going to write that book? Nobody, if not me. So I just decided then I would do it.

Crimes are like books. The occurrence of the crime creates a grab from the banal daily life flow and puts it into a frame, under a microscope. The crime brackets life in the same way that a novel brackets time, and within the brackets you can start to study different flows. Sometimes there can be belated justice as a result of these investigations, which is great—a belated understanding of the whole systemic injustice that led to the situation in the first place.

KB

With this work, were you able to imbue it with this sense of delayed justice, or give empathy and a deeper understanding of what happened?

CK

I would hope that at the very least, it gives a window into what the culture and consciousness is outside of the intellectual worlds in mainstream America. It's not something that's looked at much in high art. But what justice can there be? Yes, the sentences for the kids are way too long. That's true. But at the same time, they shot this guy dead a day before his 34th birthday, and his small child lost her dad. The victim’s father is devastated. He sits in his car in front of the park all day long and can't find the will to do anything. His sisters are ravaged. One of the public defenders, an old lefty guy who graduated law school in the ’70s, gave a little speech at the sentencing hearing about what a tragedy it was on all sides. He said, we have to ask ourselves, How can this happen?.

I took up that question. Of course in the end it’s unanswerable, but I can try to open it up a little bit. Isn’t that always a question you start with, when writing anything? How did this happen? How does this work? Even in art criticism, you ask yourself …how did this work come to be? Looking at artworks or reading books, it's about getting sucked into the world of the piece. It's very exciting to connect that to the artist, to the person who made it, and think about what the process might have been and how the piece came to be. There's all of these different tangents to investigate.

KB

Do you identify as an art critic?

CK

Not at all. I'm a writer who sometimes writes about art and culture.

KB

In Video Green you write about this specific moment in the LA art world in the late 90s, where the art object, in a perfect vacuum, is prioritized over subjectivity and the consideration of social theory. I'm curious if you find that criticism is still responding to that same prompt?

CK

No, it responds to different prompts. I don't even know. [Laughs.] You tell me because I don't read it that carefully anymore. What would you say the prompts are now that everybody feels they have to get in?

KB

In New York specifically, a lot of the criticism and art in the 2010’s was oriented around social theory, emphasizing the individual “lived experience.” Currently, we might be seeing a somewhat similar knee-jerk reaction against the kind of subjective experience you described in late-90s art—though it's now siphoned through the lens of the internet.

CK

That's right. But, whatever the formula is at the moment, it's never as interesting as when someone is doing something original, both thought and felt. You can always tell the difference. If somebody is doing something real, then you wanna read it. You want to follow it and solve the mystery. You want to find out what they think. And if somebody is just stepping into the same shoes and doing the walk, it's boring, whatever the walk at that time happens to be.

KB

When you're teaching writing, do you segue into art writing?

CK

Sometimes, yes. Teaching writing is always about looking and observing and then translating into words: looking, thinking, feeling, and then putting things into words. Writing about art is a really good way to do that. We always do a little bit of that. Every semester we look at something visual and try to find words for it.

This semester I'm calling my class “investigative fiction.” I have a lot of foreign students from Korea and China, so I've now been looking more for fiction from those countries. So we're reading a novel called The Golden Age by Wang Xiaobo that was just translated a couple years ago, about the Chinese Cultural Revolution and then an old favorite—Colette's book, The Vagabond.

KB

I’m curious how you first got started at ArtCenter, specifically.

CK

I've had a wonderful situation for the last four years. I've been writer-in-residence at ArtCenter and that involved doing studio visits with grad students and then teaching a writing class, either grad or undergrad. There was a point when I was teaching independently. I was kind of broke at a certain point and I thought, “Okay, I'll teach.” I put it up on Facebook at the time and just thought, well, the first people that sign up, that's the group. That was really fun. I did that twice in LA. You know who did that in Los Angeles when I first moved here? There used to be ads in the back of the LA Weekly for John Rechy’s writing workshop that he had in his living room. I so wish I had gone to that. What an amazing thing, right? Can you imagine going to John Rechy’s apartment and taking a writing class with him? How phenomenal.

KB

Have you found that academia, and teaching writing, has changed the way that you write?

CK

I wonder—I'm always so jealous of my students. I always feel that they're better writers than I am. They often are. I always do the exercises alongside them. Whatever I ask them to do, I do myself. Quite often, somebody will do it better, or several people will do it better. Then I think, “The only thing I've got on my side is I know I'm gonna stick to it. I'm gonna persist.” And who knows if they will succeed or not? But there are some enormously talented people who come to writing with such insights and visions, sometimes in such a naive and spontaneous way. So yes, just like I inhale books, I've certainly inhaled some student work and it's kind of become part of my DNA.

There was one extraordinary piece last semester, by a woman in my class, Agape Zhang, who's from China and went back for a funeral. She wrote a thirty-page account of the funeral, rotating the point of view between her character coming from the US, the corpse himself, the corpse’s widow, the neighbors. It was just masterful, extraordinary. There's always so much to copy in what other people write.

KB

You have a really intimate relationship to traveling, back to your childhood when you moved from the Bronx to New Zealand, and place has figured prominently in your work. Do you feel nomadic, by nature or by nurture?

CK

Both, maybe. Sylvère described himself as the postmodern nomad. He prided himself on it. That nomadism, of course, was driven by the trauma that he carried from being a hidden child during the Second World War. I think my nomadism comes from a sunnier place, a curiosity and a desire for all kinds of experiences. Maybe that was awakened when my parents moved to New Zealand when I was still fairly young. The awareness of parallel realities being lived—that’s an incredible thing for a child. Being yanked out of an environment that once constituted the whole of reality, and to realize that an alternate reality is equally present and possible.

Willa Cather wrote about that beautifully. She moved from Chicago to Nebraska when it was still the undeveloped, uncolonized wild prairie as a small child. Later, she wrote in O Pioneers! about what it’s like to have your world turned upside down. That's the beauty of travel, although the thrill has diminished as places become more traveled, distant points become shorter and things more the same. So we may as well stay at home in our rooms and travel in other ways. Watching movies, reading books, meditating, doing little art projects, talking with people, visiting with people.

KB

Having lived mostly in Los Angeles since the mid-90s, New York still remains a significant setting in much of your writing. Have you returned back to New York to live or work since then?

CK

I was in the East Village forever. I thought I'd never leave. I kept an apartment in New York, in the Bronx. That was up until about maybe 2008 or so. But after Sylvère retired from Columbia, we cut those ties. So I just became like anybody else—going two or three times a year.

KB

I’ve often imagined that New York is a very hard place to age in, with the kind of energy and vigor it requires. I can't imagine being 95 and living in New York, though of course, thousands of people do.

CK

Well, if you're 95, I think what’s in your room matters more than where it is! But I think 45 is tough in New York.

KB

How so?

CK

Because unless you're extremely wealthy, you can't have any possessions. You can't spread out in any way. Your whole life is compacted into such a tiny micro space. Your home life is so micro, and your life really takes place outside. That's hard to maintain. New York has gotten so much harder too, just in general, I couldn't imagine living there now.

It's changed so many times since I've left. Cities are very similar now. They're expensive. There's very little public space that you can access without paying for. They’ve become nexuses for people to meet in rather than places with any daily-life culture going on. It's quite different.

KB

Living and working in LA, have you found a writing community? How does that compare to your time writing in New York?

CK

I don't really know what the writing community is in New York because I haven't lived there for so long, but there's definitely a community in LA. Sammy Loren does this great reading series called Casual Encountersz. Caitlin Forst has been doing a series at Stories. And Semiotext(e), of course, we do several book events a season and people really turn up for it. It's good.

KB

I don't know if you feel the same way about LA as you did when you wrote Video Green in 2004, but you describe LA as “an empty screen of white days. There's nothing here except for what you're able to project onto it. Los Angeles is a triumph of the new age.” I love that line. I was just there visiting for the holidays, and I could still pick up on that sense of vastness, or openness. Does LA feel more familiar, or like home to you? 

CK

As much as any place else? Yes. I mean, LA is the perfect home for the rootless. Things aren’t in your face in the way that they are in a smaller, more compact city. There are all these interesting things that you can dive into, or just retreat from entirely.

KB

On the topic of failure—a lot of your creative output has been birthed out of your own grappling with failure, a kind of self-immolation as an artist, as a filmmaker, as a woman. How do you view failure differently now, versus how you perceived it when you were first writing I Love Dick? Is failure generative?

CK

Well, I like comedy. Failure is part of the comedy of life because we always want so much, we try so many things, and inevitably a lot of them "fail". The gap between our desires and expectations and reality is always a comic gap. People may call that failure, but to me, it’s the comic gap between reality and the ideal.

KB

You once said that “failure is a feminist question.” Can you go more into this?

CK

Oh, yes. Because for so long—and I think this is less true now—there was so much shame attached to all kinds of female work. It was as if there was this barrier of shame that had to be broken through before anyone could manifest or speak. The shame of using anything to do with your own experience or the shame of trying to venture outside your experience into another realm that's not considered your own…at the time, I felt that failure needed to be owned and claimed in order to be overcome and annihilated. It's not really personal to me. I think the culture has changed a lot, that layer of shame that surrounds women's experience. It's no longer there in the way that it was.

KB

What have you compromised or sacrificed over the course of your career, if anything?

CK

Nothing.

KB

Nothing?

CK

Nothing! No. I never had to, because I've always worked for very small stakes. All of my books are self-published. I'm the co-editor of the press that publishes my books. So I've never dealt with a major trade press. If the stakes are that low, then you have a lot of creative control and I've been happy with that.

KB

Very few people in the arts have managed to live exclusively off their work, and it’s becoming increasingly less common as the price of living continues to rise. Have you found that dividing your time between writing, teaching, and pursuing other work has also allowed you flexibility to not compromise, and ultimately create a viable artistic life?

CK

Exactly. I knew from the get-go that I would never, ever be able to support myself as an artist on the proceeds of my work. The choices were either to change my work to make it more commercially viable, or find some other source of income. So I decided to do the latter. I still own apartments in Albuquerque, New Mexico and everyday there are phone calls concerning plumbing and dishwashers, roofs and A/C. I have to keep an eye on a lot of things at the same time. But the day is long and that gives me some freedom. I'm lucky enough not to have a very heavy teaching load. I don't know if I'd be able to handle that. A lot of people do. If you have to teach three or four classes a week, I don't know how you’d combine that with other work. But teaching one or two classes is always a pleasure.

I've never been able to fully commit to the art world. So I have these things going way outside that orbit. The roof is leaking at the fourplex. What are we going to do, repair or replace? It's a little vacation away from other concerns. When I was doing all the kinky sex stuff that I wrote about in Video Green, that was another kind of vacation from the art world. It was like a research project, a thing that took me out of the LA/New York art world. That's the pleasure of being able to be a writer or an artist: you can continue to pursue these curiosities and interests throughout your life. It’s the greatest pleasure and freedom.