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Any Deadly thing: Roy Kesey

As part of my ongoing guest post series in this blog, we recently heard from Pippa Goldschmidt. Today, it is my pleasure to welcome established author, writing teacher, and contributor to the Cooked Up anthology, Roy Kesey. He would be answering questions on writing, his career and his advice for those starting on the writing journey.

Roy Kesey gives very useful, practical advice, some of which I’ve highlighted for you in blue.

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1. You’ve lived in a lot of places, and written stories in varied settings, with very diverse premises. What are your tips on research for fiction?

Do as much as you can, and then do some more, and then keep on doing it, for the rest of your life. Really, there’s no other way to keep from producing the kind of thing that will have locals (and anyone else who knows how things really are) rolling their eyes. Also, it will give you access to so much material you’d never have come across otherwise. For example, no matter what kind of job you give to a character, that field has an extraordinary lexical wealth to it, and there’s no better way to give authority and texture to your writing than to have your character think and talk about his or her work in authentic ways.

Another thing I like to do is track down the names (and email addresses) of experts in the field I happen to be researching. They are almost invariably generous with their time and knowledge, and many consider sharing what they know to be a kind of public service. Talking to a top-drawer glaciologist, for example, will not only enrich your story set in the Arctic; it will also help the glaciologist to share good information about how our planet is changing, and what we might hope to do about it.

2. Your stories have been widely published and anthologised. To an aspiring writer submitting to magazines, what would be your advice?

I wish there was some magic formula I could share, but as far as I know, there just isn’t one. There’s only the work—always the work—plus a certain amount of bookkeeping savvy and diligence. Over the years I’ve developed a sense of which magazines are likely to be interested in a given kind of story, but there’s no way to get that except by reading those magazines regularly—if not cover-to-cover, at least the work on their websites. If you do that, and you follow their guidelines carefully, and you’re producing good work, it’s going to find a home. It may take a while—an unfortunately long while, in some cases—but sooner or later an editor will fall in love with it. I realize that’s not a particularly fashionable thing to say these days—you’ll hear others claim that it can’t be done without contacts and an MFA from the get-go—and certainly there are magazines that solicit all or most of the work they end up publishing, but there are also plenty of magazines out there with editors who love nothing more than pulling a gem from the slush.

3. Which of your books would you point to someone unfamiliar with your work?

If a given reader happened to enjoy “How Things End,” they might also like the collection in which it appears, Any Deadly Thing, and maybe the novella to which it is, in a way, related—my first book, Nothing in the World.

4. Who are your writing influences, the authors whose work has inspired you? 

I think that most of the instincts that can serve you well as a writer are born out of your experiences as a reader, especially as a young reader. The electric current that surges through you when you happen upon an amazing plot twist or characterization or insight or line of dialogue—that’s where everything starts. A proto-writer is just someone who decides to break the sentence or paragraph apart to figure out how the author managed to produce such an extraordinary affect.

The stuff I read as a kid was pretty standard, probably. Tales of Robin Hood and King Arthur; Dahl and Tolkien, Bradbury and Costain and Rawlings; The Swiss Family Robinson and Watership Down. As for the work that I go back to now to be reminded of all the cool things that fiction can be asked to do, you’re looking at Donald Barthelme and Flannery O’Connor, Borges and Calvino, Cortázar and Gide, Anne Carson and Nathanael West, and lately an increasing obsession with Virginia Woolf.

5. When planning a short story collection, what factors do you keep in mind?

The factors differ from book to book, but my guiding principles usually involve variety and pace. Many collections consist of stories that are excellent when taken individually, but are so similar in terms of voice or plot movement or character type that they all start to run together in my mind if I read more than one or two at a time. My hope is that both All Over and Any Deadly Thing can be read start to finish—that each story is unique enough to stand apart from the others, even while preparing the reader in some sense for the next story in line. It’s often just a matter of paying attention to logistics. I like to vary from story to story especially in terms of length, setting, point of view, and diction. It isn’t always possible to ensure that a given story won’t share any of those elements with the stories right before and after it, but that’s what I’m aiming for.

Author Roy Kesey

Roy Kesey Pacazo

6. What’s the latest book you’ve read that you would recommend, and why?

I’m crazy in love with all nine of the books I’m teaching this semester as the writer-in-residence at Washington College. The course is called “Non/Fiction,” and we’re working with Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Amy Fusselman’s The Pharmacist’s Mate, George Trow’s In the Context of No Context, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, Renata Adler’s Speedboat, and Anne Carson’s Nox.

It would be an exercise in futility to try to choose a favorite from among them. The Carson and the Sebald were particularly overwhelming as re-reads. And the Fusselman text, while perhaps less well-known than some of the others, deserves a special shout-out. It’s novella-length nonfiction—not the most common of forms—and it’s wise and brave and funny and heart-breaking. Its two through-lines are interwoven and layered with etymology and parallels gifted by the world, each short section adding good meat. It’s really a very fine book.

Do you love Food Fiction?

Cooked Up: Food Fiction from around the World

7. Please tell us about your story in the Cooked Up Anthology, and what inspired you to write it.

“How Things End” got its start all the way back in the summer of 1990. I was in love with a woman who happened to be staying in a small town on the Adriatic coast, so I made my way down there from Lithuania, where I’d been teaching. The war in Croatia hadn’t begun, but you could feel it coming. And that summer I made friends whom I went back to visit during the war in 1992 and 1993.

The first bit of writing that came out of all that was an episodic, unsuccessful story, which later became an unsuccessful novel, which, several years later, became my first book, the novella Nothing in the World. Of the half-novel that got cut in the process, some of its bits still interested me, two of which happened to be based on episodes from the original unsuccessful story: one about a soldier’s funeral, and one about a badly damaged young man that I met in the course of a gathering in a village on the Cetina River.

“How Things End” grew out of an interest in bringing those two episodes back together. I’m glad that it finally found a home in the world, both for its own sake and because it serves, as I mentioned above, as something of a coda to Nothing in the World.

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Roy Kesey

Roy Kesey

Roy Kesey‘s latest books are the short story collection Any Deadly Thing (Dzanc Books 2013) and the novel Pacazo (Dzanc Books 2011/Jonathan Cape 2012). He is the winner of an NEA grant for fiction and a PEN/Heim grant for translation. His short stories, essays, translations and poems have appeared in about a hundred magazines and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories and New Sudden Fiction. He is currently the Writer-in-Residence at Washington College.

Click to Tweet this Post: Useful #fiction #writetips from @roykesey on research and curating short story collections: http://ctt.ec/at8U1+ via @damyantig

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Do you read or write short stories? If you do enjoy them, why? And if not, why not? Checked out the Cooked Up anthology?  Find interviews with other authors from this anthology HERE. Do you have questions for Roy Kesey– about his work, the publishing scene or his experience and advice as an author? Drop them in the comments!

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Damyanti Biswas

Damyanti Biswas is the author of You Beneath Your Skin and numerous short stories that have been published in magazines and anthologies in the US, the UK, and Asia. She has been shortlisted for Best Small Fictions and Bath Novel Awards and is co-editor of the Forge Literary Magazine. Her literary crime thriller series, the Blue Mumbai, is represented by Lucienne Diver from The Knight Agency. Both The Blue Bar and The Blue Monsoon were published in 2023.

I appreciate comments, and I always visit back. If you're having trouble commenting, let me know via the contact form, or tweet me up @damyantig !

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27 Comments

  • Maliny Mohan says:

    I am a short story writer myself. Thanks for bringing to us such a renowned personality. I loved going through his tips, experiences and take on writing.

  • Marquessa says:

    Why did it take so long to stumble across your blog??

  • cleemckenzie says:

    Getting that research done is so important. I’m glad he emphasized that in this interview. I love anthologies, so these sound great to me.

  • Thanks for the reminder that writing takes time and is hard work. It’s easy for writers to get frustrated when things don’t happen quickly.

  • macjam47 says:

    Wonderful interview Damyanti! Both the questions and the answers went beyond what is the norm for blog post interviews. Great information.

  • Akshay Varma says:

    Hello,
    Just stumbled upon this blog in the recommendations section and i am delighted to read the conversation. I have been writing small stories myself from the last two years and recently switched to my first novel series Namaste Thoughts There were many good points that answered some of my questions after reading the conversation and i look forward to reading more of it. Thank you

  • Jon-Paul says:

    I just love, admire, and above all — enjoy what you are doing here. This is more than a blog — this is a way of life for me.

  • Excellent interview. I love that term “proto-writer” and I have to agree. I think that much of what I write and how I write was definitely influenced both by the books that I fell in love with as a kid and the stories I was told by my family. It is fascinating to take apart a story or a sentence and look at what is there and why it works.

    I love short stories, both reading and writing them. They fill in the cracks of my reading and writing life when I don’t have time to read or write something longer.

  • I had never heard of lablit before! What a fascinating genre. I like that idea–latching onto professionals in different fields and getting their expertise. Somehow we have this perception that they’re way too busy to consider speaking with us, but I still give personalized advice when someone asks for writing help. Don’t you?

  • Love that list of books to read. There are a few I missed that are now in my TBR pile.

  • Love the idea of Proto writer and different length for anthology, Roy. For an aspiring writer like me, this interview is rich in learning. Superb job as always Damyanti for unique questions.

  • Thanks Damyanti for a great interview and subject matter. I love writing short stories because you really have to hone your writing skills. They also allow me to explore writing in different themes and genres.
    Also, thanks again, most writing articles in the blogosphere tend to ignore shorts.

  • Susan Scott says:

    Thanks Damyanti and Roy Kesey! Great tips. I agree that short stories can sound much of the same if read one after the other – although Roald Dahl and his short stories eg Switch Bitch are compulsive and so different from one to the next.

  • shanayatales says:

    I am new to this author, and honestly have not read many short stories, but I do intend to explore this format more.
    Oh and I loved reading the tips – very helpful.
    Thanks for sharing. 🙂

  • Birgit says:

    Great advice especially talking/e-mailing the experts and learning more and more…and more about a certain topic.

  • Great interview! A lot of beneficial tips here. Thanks 🙂

  • Never thought about anthology stories all starting to sound the same, but I guess they can.
    Interviewing experts is excellent advice.

  • Lovely interview.

  • ccyager says:

    I love to read short stories in bed, just before sleep. Then I’m not tempted to read longer than I should! I also write short stories. Their challenge to me is to be restrained, concise, and clear. Otherwise, I love to go on and on, so novels suit me better. I am working on a short story right now and it’s very difficult, but I consider that a worthwhile challenge. I know exactly how I’ll feel when I finish it!

  • Chris White says:

    Excellent interview. Thanks for posting.

  • I’ve been writing for just over two years but in that time I feel like my brain has exploded. Among the myriad projects I’ve been working on are a large collection of short stories. To be honest, it’s only since I’ve been writing that I’ve started reading and really enjoying short stories! So my question is what to do with them? What’s the first step? Is there a guide to finding the right forum for publishing your work? Or is assembling them into a collection for publication in book form the way to go? As always, a wonderful interview, Damyanti. Thanks for this!

    • Roy Kesey says:

      Thanks, Meg. There may be other ways to it, but every short story writer I know started by publishing individual stories in literary magazines. (It’s different for novelists, obviously, who can pitch their first novel directly to agents–though most of them, too, start with short stories in magazines.) I spoke to the process a bit in question #2 above. Beyond that, a quick web search (try “how where publish short story” or something similar) will provide you with a surfeit of lists of magazines to learn more about and submit to, and helpful hints re: cover letters. Good luck!