Waiting for Karen Russell to arrive at English Department Chair William Martino’s office was perhaps one of the most stressful moments of my life. My leg bounced up and down as I clutched my copy of “Orange World” in my hands for her to sign; beside me, seniors Sasha Dausey, Lily Temkin, and Curran Dee were in similar states of anxiety. Ms. Russell is a New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist; her many accolades, masterful writing, and eloquent words at the Symposium assembly made me a bit starstruck.
When Ms. Russell finally entered the ambient office in a flurry of bubbly introductions and warm smiles, we came to realize our worries were for naught. Ms. Russell settled into one of the many seats scattered through the office and happily signed the books my fellow journalists and I had nervously presented to her as she talked us through her experience becoming an author, the influences present in her writing, and her favorite characters in her stories. Nothing I could write about her, though, could come close to just how elegant and thoughtful of a speaker she is—I’ll let you experience that for yourself in the abridged transcript of our half-hour-long interview below.
Raine Wang: From your side of things, what was the process like in being selected as this year’s Symposium author?
Karen Russell: So, I work with Random House Speakers Bureau, and they coordinate visits like this one for authors, and my representative there sent me one of the most beautiful, thoughtful invitations I’ve ever received from Cam [English teacher Cameron Biondi]. It told me a little bit about Symposium and school and the other authors who have come.
It felt too good to be true. I was really honored. The idea that it wasn’t just one book, but the totality of the things I’ve been working on, was so different. I was also so touched to learn that students teach students about this work, which is unprecedented. That’s never been my experience anywhere; you score these dreams on paper, mostly for strangers, and it’s rare to get any echoes back at all, so to come into a room where a lot of new, wonderful, young people have given that kind of care and attention to your words is a special experience.
Lily Temkin: How did you become an author? What were some of the challenges you faced in the industry, and how do you overcome them?
KR: I always wanted to be a writer, even when I was six, as soon as I could start turning sticks into sense. I wanted to be a writer in proportion to how much I loved reading. That was my drug of choice. I was at my happiest in a library bean bag chair; reading a book was terrestrial heaven to me.
I think a lot of writers are fledged in libraries. I needed to read the way that you need to breathe air; I could not imagine living without reading. But, I don’t think that I knew as a young person that it was a career. I was like, “I don’t know if that’s economically viable.” I didn’t know anyone who just wrote for a living. I think I thought I would be a teacher or a librarian; something that was writing-adjacent. There’s not a clear path to becoming a writer, you know?
You can work at a gas station and be a writer. You can be an astronaut and also write. There’s not any one path, and that’s really liberating, but I think it can also be confusing. There are these other very clear, well-lit pathways to lawyer, doctor, engineer. And writer is kind of a question mark.
When I went to school, I thought I was going to be a journalism major, but I kind of defected. I fell in love with my creative writing classes, my literature classes. Journalism is a really tight constraint. I was not good at it. I was always getting dinged by my editor for my flowery language and he’d say, “You don’t need all this embroidery.” But that was so much of the pleasure for me: making things happen with sentences and playing around with language, the way painters do with paint.
This is all to say, I fell in love with writing. I think my family was concerned because I said I was going to get a graduate degree in creative writing, which does not sound like the path to stability and security. And then mysteriously—and there was a real element of luck, too—it did sort of work out.
Sasha Dausey: Our next question gets into the weeds a little bit, but how much of your writing is influenced by your lived experiences?
KR: I love getting into the weeds. Getting into the weeds is most of my process. The weeds are where I’m happiest—just going line by line and clause by clause.
It’s a funny question; I mean, I think, “Orange World,” of the stories I’ve written, is the closest to autobiography. Temporally, I was writing it when I was experiencing this fever dream of new motherhood, so it wasn’t that distant from that experience. When I was writing “Swamplandia!,” I was in my twenties, so there was a little bit of perspective. It had happened long enough ago that I could remember it, but I wasn’t immersed in it. I had a little bit of distance from the canvas. “Orange World,” in some ways, feels the most viscerally true because I was in the thick of that topography of love and terror for this new little being.
But, I think everything is autobiographical, right? It’s just not in a one-to-one way. Like, my dad was not anything like Chief Bigtree, except grief and addiction and love were all present in my family, so that part of the story, I understand. There’s certain events that you could map from my life onto that story, but I wouldn’t have been able to write it at all if I was writing a memoir, if I was under the spell of my name.
What feels liberating for me about fiction is that there’s a freedom to it. It’s scary, also, because even I don’t know what’s going to show up on the page. It does feel like a seance to me; I don’t even know, when I’m drafting, what’s going to come up, and it’s humbling sometimes. I don’t know if you guys had this experience, where you think you’re writing something totally new, unlike anything you’ve ever done, and gradually, as you do the leaf rubbing, you’re like, “Oh, you again!” You know what I mean? It’s like blood welling to a cut. That has been a humbling thing about writing—you start to learn that your preoccupations are not infinite.
Memory is always the substrate of imagination, in the work that I make. So even if it’s not direct—and it rarely is—there’s some memory that I’m plugging into to make those people in their world live. I would say it’s very rare for me to take an event and just fictionalize it, but you can see where the roots are sunk in autobiography, and it’s much more frequently some wacky what-if that lets me talk about some dimension of being alive that isn’t specific to me.
RW: You mentioned that “Orange World” was a collection that was influenced by your own experience with motherhood. When you put together these collections, do you normally have a theme in mind? Do you think to yourself, “Oh, this is gonna be in blank collection,” or “I’m going to write a couple of stories centered around blank theme.”
KR: Making a story collection does feel to me like in the ancient days before Spotify when you would call the radio and request a song and then wait there with a tape to record it. Then you would laboriously stitch together these songs into like an emotional experience for the lucky recipient of your mixtape. There is something that feels sort of like that to me—there’s something kind of intuitive about figuring out, “Well, okay, what stories belong together?”
There are some stories that aren’t in the collections, and it was usually the weaker version of a story that now exists. There’ll be drafts that are competing for my attention. I wrote a story about a pregnant unicorn that felt too close [to other stories I wrote]. I was addressing some of the same questions [in it] and I felt like it would siphon some energy away from the other supernatural labor and delivery story.
But, usually, I have no idea, and it’ll be three or four stories into the collection. Leaf rubbing is still what’s coming to mind—you start to get a sense of what the book is concerned with. They’ve all been a little bit different. “Vampires in the Lemon Grove” has so much monstrous metamorphosis. “Orange World” felt a little bit more like landscape stories to me, but it’s usually kind of intuitive and I never really set out knowing at all. It almost feels like a little archipelago—you get to the next island and you’re like, “Oh, I can map where I’ve been. And look at that vague shoreline on the horizon!” It starts to come into focus.
Curran Dee: How has your experience at KO been so far, relative to your expectations? Has it lived up to your expectations, or has it been different in any way?
KR: I really haven’t been here all that long in clock time, but I feel like I know everybody. I feel like it [the visit] has been structured to give me these really profound encounters with young readers and writers, and that is not always the norm. I feel very lucky to be here, and happy to know that schools like this exist.
I love this quote so much—it’s Robin Wall Kimmerer’s. “An educated person is someone who knows what their gifts are and how to give them to the world.” Both of those things [are important]: developing your gifts, but also knowing how to give them back to the world that gave you everything.
I get the sense that this is that kind of incubator, after hearing your teachers talk about you with such a degree of caring and awe. That is also not the norm; some educators seem to resent the fact that they still have students. They’re like, “You again! Go away.” They have been ready for retirement for, like, 20 years. So, to meet teachers who are so passionate about their students’ passions is really cool.
Getting to field questions about these stories is also a real delight. I think younger readers ask the best questions because they’re honest questions. I get these kinds of questions sometimes at bookstore readings, where another older person is like, “My question is: have you read my work?” It’s more of a statement, or an assertion of dominance. And that doesn’t happen here, obviously. It feels like genuine searching.
LT: You talked a little bit about how your characters are branched from you, or your siblings, or some people in your life. We were wondering: if you could spend a day with any character you’ve written, who would it be?
KR: I really like Kitsune from “Reeling for the Empire.” I think she’s such an interesting, strong person, and I like her arc a lot. There’s a question that I have where I’m like, “When they burst forth from their cocoons, what did they become?” It’d be nice to meet her on the other side of her metamorphosis, and just check in with her.
SD: In the assembly, they mentioned that your novel “Swamplandia!” was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. That year, no winner was selected. What happened with that?
KR: I still don’t know, to be very honest with you. The facts that are known are just that none of those books received enough votes to become the winner. I’ve been on juries now myself and I think it’s helped me to understand what can happen behind closed doors.
For me, this was my first novel. I was 27 when I sold it, and a little bit older when it came out, so everything that happened for that book was already in excess of anything I could have expected. I had written stories before, but story collections don’t get quite the same readership, and they don’t receive the same attention as novels.
But, anyway, it was my first novel, and I was thrilled to be a finalist and I mean that sincerely. It was amazing to me. David Foster Wallace and Dennis Johnson are incredible writers; it was like a great company to be in. It was a little confusing, also. If I knew what happened there, I would tell you, but I sincerely don’t.
I have been on juries now, and you start to realize that it [an award] is not necessarily an objective metric. I think that for me, there are other yardsticks that are more important. I’m always a grateful recipient of any honor or prize—it, of course, feels good, and I’m grateful, but there are really different measures of success.
You don’t sit down when you’re writing your stories and think, “I can’t wait to win a prize.” You want to write something that matters to someone. That’s why I think writers write—you have this insane faith that you could write something that matters to a stranger. That, for me, is a much better metric for success. Anytime someone tells me that I wrote something that meant something to them, that’s it. That’s everything.
