Kim White is another wonderful author I met at the excellent Books with Bite workshop, led by Nova Ren Suma and Micol Ostow, at the Highlights Foundation this past September. I had such a good time that, basically, I don’t want to let go. Hence this series of interviews with my fellow writers. 

Hi, Kim. I had a really transformative experience at Books with Bite, in terms of re-evaluating what I want to write and why. What was the workshop like for you?

There was nothing not to like about the workshop. The focus on horror themes, the setting in the woods of Pennsylvania, and the stellar workshop leaders made Books with Bite a great experience. But far and away the best thing about the workshop was the other writers—talented women who were generous with feedback and willing to open up and share their own experiences. Everyone was working at a professional level, which made me feel challenged and inspired. I would definitely recommend it.

What’s the appeal in writing about dark and scary things?

I like a particular kind of dark and scary. I’m interested in stories about the monster within. The horror of being the monster is scarier to me than being in the path of the monster.

My first book, Scratching for Something, was a collection of flash fiction that explored this theme. In each piece, a character undergoes a transformation, and their body takes on a physical manifestation of their psychological state. To give a few examples: a man turns into a tree but his human heart remains beating inside the trunk; a woman’s breasts become actual fruit that she has to eat to survive; a man finds he can remove his head and walked around with it tucked under his arm; a woman coughs up her soul and keeps it in a jar, watching it shrink to the size of a raisin. The transformations are monstrous and horrifying but also infused with an inwardness and self-discovery. I’m fascinated by what we make of the dark parts of ourselves.

You also have a novelette about grief that you wrote in response to the 9/11 attacks. 

Yes, in Diurnal, Susan’s past experiences and premonitions of the future indicate that her dream of having a child will go horribly wrong, but she goes ahead anyway. When the boy she gives birth to dies, she raises her daughter as the son she lost. The second part of the story is from the point of view of Gabriel, Susan’s daughter. We see how Gabriel maintains her own sanity with a different kind of magical thinking. Gabriel believes she was the child sending dreams and premonitions to her mother before birth, and that her mother mistook them as coming from her brother. Gabriel believes she has found proof in her mother’s diaries that she was the child her mother was (literally) dreaming about.

Can you tell us about a time when you were really scared?

This is tough to answer because I can’t tell you about a time I was really scared in a few paragraphs. When really scary things happen, like being in NYC during the 9/11 attacks, or seeing someone get shot on 42nd street, or being in a subway car when someone is being stabbed, I have to write stories because the emotions these experiences provoke are so complex. It’s fear mixed with anger, sadness, hope—it often takes years and many thousands of words for me to sort it out.

What’s your favorite scary story?

I like noir films, psychological thrillers, and dystopian science fiction. Silence of the Lambs, The Shining, The Matrix, Enders Game are some of my favorites, but I also spend a lot of time with literary fiction that delves into what really scares me—death and oblivion. One of my favorite terrifying passages is from Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory. He opens with this stunning first sentence: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” The image of life as a fragile crack of light, or as a baby dangled over a dark void, is nightmarish because it feels so true and inescapable. We can’t do anything to escape the oblivion to come—that’s terrifying to me.

Kim White holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from Hunter College. She is the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize at Hunter College, The Catalina Paez and Seumas MacManus Award, the Shuster Award for an outstanding Master’s degree thesis, a Bingham Writing Fellowship from Columbia University, and a Forbes Foundation Grant.

You can check out more of her work here and here.