As part of our ongoing Stories Matter feature section which highlights important lessons on the art and practice of writing, we’re excited to introduce our Craft Conversation series. Hear directly from some of our favorite authors about their reflections on their career, their most valued writing advice, and what’s next from them.
I’ve been obsessed with Karen Russell and her whimsically atmospheric, sometimes frightening work since I got my hands on a copy of her 2019 short story collection, Orange World, late last year. Russell is an award-winning author, well-known for her short story collections like Vampires in the Lemon Grove and St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, as well as her debut novel, Swamplandia!. Her stories often take place in Florida, a nod to her Miami childhood.
Needless to say, I was thrilled to have the chance to interview her when she spoke at The University of South Carolina Aiken, my alma mater. Our conversation felt like making a new best friend at summer camp, except instead of making friendship bracelets we discussed literature
In our conversation, we talked about Karen’s early relationship with language, her views on embracing “weird” as a compliment, and how her new novel, The Antidote, forthcoming in 2025, has changed her perspective on writing.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Erin Weeks
I read an interview with you where you said you collected seashells whenever you were a kid…my question is, do you see your stories in a similar way, like you’re collecting pieces of your experiences?
Karen Russell
Oh, what a beautiful question. You know, maybe not quite so much collecting pieces of my experiences but definitely in the way that a shell is a vessel, maybe it’s a little bit like that, you know? I used to love as a kid [when] you would get some Nautilus and hear the ocean in it, it did feel like some primordial telephone or something. So I do think art is always a vessel of a kind, right? Definitely I use pieces of experience, but it’s some braid of memory and imagination usually…That’s a beautiful image for a story collection, it kind of is like a bucket of seashells, it really is! They all come from the ocean of one’s own consciousness…you shape them and sculpt them and polish them but ideally they’re holding something, some question…rarely do you get an answer to a question but sometimes you can hold some mystery.
Erin Weeks
Sure! I know a lot of your stories, they sort of lean towards the strange…when does “weird” stop being an insult and start becoming a compliment?
Karen Russell
I love that question! I mean, I think regular life is so intensely weird… I guess what we’re doing seems sort of normal, we’re talking to each other in fluorescent lighting on a college campus, right? And nevertheless most people at all times are simultaneously somewhere partly in the future, they’re thinking about the distant past… the ways that people just live in these straddling time zones and realities, you know, the flux of consciousness, I think that’s something that fiction can capture and it’s deeply weird! I often feel like, wow, it is just a surreal thing to have this infinite imagination in a mortal body and to get to, like, bridge subjectivities with somebody… I do think ‘weird’ is a compliment ‘cause it means that you’re getting at something true about just being alive, and time… There is no ordinary day, you know? My kids remind me of this ‘cause the whole world is a world without precedent, so it’s not that it ever gets any less marvelous or weird, we kind of grow inured to it. We get a little bit numb to it … I’m always complimented by ‘weird.’
Erin Weeks
When you were growing up did you think that you’d become an author someday?
Karen Russell
For a little while I was like, maybe I’ll be a librarian, because in Miami that meant you got to be in air conditioning and read. So that did seem pretty dreamy, you were surrounded by books in an air conditioned zone…but it’s not clear how you go from wanting to be a writer to publishing anything, right? I think for many people, that is a lonely stretch. It’s not like being an engineer, being an astronaut. There’s not really always a clear path to publication. For a book-length project, I think everybody has to find their own way through the woods on that!
Erin Weeks
Do you think your work should be considered horror, or is it more complex than that?
Karen Russell
With all genre categorizations, I get a little bit shy about naming any of them, I think that often it’s sort of a mashup, right? Or just fed by a lot of different inspirations. Swamplandia! is sometimes called Southern Gothic and sometimes called Magical Realism. I think when I was writing I was less concerned about taxonomy and just more trying to write a true story. That often ended up meaning that I was drawing on different [genres]… There are stories I guess that kind of play with horror tropes. I have this woman in Orange World who has made a pact with the devil, and she’s going to nurse the devil to save her child’s life, which felt very the Brothers Grimm or something. If there is horror, it’s often kind of quiet and has something to do with that gulf between what people wish to believe and what is true, or the stories people tell about themselves, and the monstrous things we’re all capable of.
Erin Weeks
“Bog Girl” is one of the stories featured in Orange World and it was originally published in The New Yorker. In it, you have a guy who becomes kind of romantically obsessed with a petrified body… do you think that people, somewhere deep inside of them, can relate to themes like obsession?
Karen Russell
I hope so… My English teacher, I remember, was reading Cujo – this was like, a very sweet woman in a turtleneck – and I was thinking, people are weirder than they present on the surface. People have depths that are so invisible and complex and scary and marvelous. It’s just an interesting feature of reality, a lot of that is sort of occluded from view… I found the fact that there is this appetite in people for that kind of darkness to be strangely consoling, ‘cause it was sort of a way of saying, ‘I’m not crazy to apprehend that in people!’
Erin Weeks
Do you find yourself modeling characters after people you’ve known, or yourself?
Karen Russell
Oh, definitely! I have a bunch of siblings in those early stories, and my brother was like, ‘why did you make this boy a fire-crotch virgin?,’ and my sister was like ‘why are there so many sisters, and ghost sisters?’ Some people will just read that as one-to-one, they’ll just assume that what you’re writing is a thinly veiled autobiography, and in my experience it rarely is that. Almost never. Definitely you’re extrapolating from your terrestrial memories – I don’t know what else you would write about – but it’s usually more of a composite. So I’m writing maybe about the relationship, or what can feel fraught about family almost universally. Chief Bigtree, a character in Swamplandia!, is definitely not my father, except insofar as I did come from a family where love and addiction and grief were all present together, but that’s many people. I wasn’t alone in that. You can be extrapolating from your life, but usually if it works at all, it will be its own new creation. I remember after this breastfeeding-the-devil story came out, many people in my family were very concerned about me. So, people can bristle. I do think you want there to be some line between art and life, in that way. But it would also be false to say none of it is autobiographical because what are you inventing out of? It’s just your memory set, right? What I can imagine is intimately connected to what I have experienced. Memory feeds the imagination. Reality is always the substrate for even the wildest story-world.
Erin Weeks
True! You’re also working on a new novel right now, The Antidote, and it’s set to come out next year. But it takes place in Nebraska. Has this given you some new perspectives on your creative process?
Karen Russell
Oh my goodness, yes, it has. For a long time, a joke about this book was that it was “drylandia” because it was set during the Dust Bowl drought. I mean, there’s nothing less swampy than that period of time.
But one of the things it’s taught me in a really sly way, I feel like this book is almost like the prequel, or analogous and an antecedent to Swamplandia!. Once again I found myself writing about what you might call willful amnesia, the fantasy of “American reinvention” that covers over our real histories and generates so much terrible violence and destruction. Some of the same questions and concerns that drive Swamplandia! haunt The Antidote as well. It’s a polyphonic novel, with mostly adult narrators. But it’s definitely about grief again. So, I think one of the instructive things was starting to understand and accept that I don’t have infinite questions! It’s funny, I mean, some of my favorite writers, it’s almost like you feel them just turning the Rubix cube, right? but you do get a sense of what they’re interested in, or what haunts them.
Erin Weeks
Have you ever read anything by V.C. Andrews?
Karen Russell
Yeah!
Erin Weeks
I love her, and everytime I read her, I’m like, she was a seriously haunted woman. You know what I mean?
Karen Russell
Yes, absolutely, and don’t you feel too like the same forces keep generating in those books?
Erin Weeks
Yes!
Karen Russell
I mean, different characters, different situations but they’re in the same universe… the thing is, the stories that you’re telling teach you something about what your ghosts are. [In The Antidote], I think I learned a lot about, kind of scaffolding something longer. It felt different than Swamplandia! because there are adult characters so it felt like a little bit of a discovery that way too. A lot of it is also from the point of view of this mother who’s lost her child, and so that wasn’t a story that would have interested me or that I could have told twenty years ago. And I’m always learning stuff, still, from the old books too! They also sort of remain open to my interpretation in a funny way. Also, I am reminded that it’s very hard to write a novel! It’s so hard! Stories make more sense to me. With a story you can kind of walk the parameters and you can kind of microtune language in a different way… Revising a novel just feels like having your nose smashed against a mural. You’re like, what is it? It’s hard to get the panorama.
Erin Weeks
When I’m in a reading rut I love a short story collection, ‘cause it’s just like, this flash of a story, and then I’m reading again.
Karen Russell
You can read it in a single sitting, and it has a powerful impact on you, right? It’s such a distilled art. I mean, articles too, I’m sure, in a similar way, you know what your word count is going to be so it’s a pretty severe constraint and it’s not quite the same as writing a book but you really have to be so conscious and deliberate.
Erin Weeks
You have to make sure your words pack the right punch.
Karen Russell
Carl Hiaasen is a Florida writer who I really like, and he says he gets, not impatient but, I mean, he worked as a journalist for so many years, he writes books so fast and I think he sees the rest of us plodding along, and he’s so used to writing on a deadline he’s not precious about it. And one thing he told me was that being someone who’s been kind of a career journalist, it just gets you over the hurdle of your own procrastination, it gets you over the hurdle of your own perfectionism.
Erin Weeks
Well, I’ve only been a journalist for about a year but hopefully this lack of procrastination will catch up to me.
Karen Russell
This is so fun, I love talking about writing, thinking about writing. Actual writing can be excruciating.
Erin Weeks
Writing is the worst part of writing! When you’re reading, what elements hook you into a story, personally?
Karen Russell
When I’m reading, I love to feel hauled along by some urgent problem or question, and I also love flights and digressions, more elliptical movements that can reveal other kinds of truths… I read this book, Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, that I absolutely loved. One of the best novels I’ve ever read. And one of the many things I loved about it is the way Akbar creates different kinds of suspense, suspense on both the vertical and horizontal axes. [The protagonist is] a new orphan, he’s Iranian-American and he’s been writing about historical martyrs, you know, Joan of Arc, Bobby Sands. He wants to find this terminally ill woman named Orkideh, she calls herself a ‘death artist,’ and he’s on a quest to find this person for his own book project, to discuss the meaning of death. He’s also newly sober, so there’s sort of this suspense of living a sober day. And then on the y axis there’s these dream dialogues that open up where he’s sort of putting his dead mother in conversation with Lisa Simpson and his dead father in conversation with Rumi, it’s so inventive and playful… and even during these beautiful flights, the reader can hear the metronome of this woman’s [impending] death, that suspense is incredibly loud—can he find her? Can he say what needs to be said before this hard deadline, that we all are up against in a way? So, it was beautiful that way and then it was also so fun, because he had, like, a poet’s ability to circumambulate and play…the real pleasures for me often are like, sensory dives into language and metaphorical captures of the weirdness of being alive.
