Some authors get deemed “writers’ writers,” meaning their work is so skillful, sharp, and brilliant, we writers flock to it. Lydia Davis, James McBride, Joy Williams, Clarice Lipspector, Lorrie Moore, Susan Choi, Denis Johnson, Jesmyn Ward—these are a few writers whose work other writers often revisit to study, for inspiration, and to marvel. I’d put National Book Award-finalist Karen E. Bender in this same category. Bender is the author of two novels and three story collections, and her short stories have appeared in prestigious publications like The New Yorker and anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and elsewhere. Her stories offer incredible precision; they’re masterfully constructed while delighting on the sentence level.
Her latest collection The Words of Dr. L and Other Stories is no exception. Some of the stories are grounded in realism and contemporary life, others veer into the speculative; but regardless of the lens, most explore parent-child relationships, particularly in spaces of separation, and provide insight into the current political moment. I’ve worked with Bender in the past, so it was a pleasure to get the opportunity to catch up over the phone and discuss The Words of Dr. L and Other Stories.
Rachel León:
You’ve had a blend of first and third person stories in your collections, but it seems as if more stories in The Words of Dr. L were in first than your previous books, particularly in most of the speculative stories. I’m always curious how writers settle on POV, which we unfortunately can’t discuss for each story, but I’m wondering how you do decide which to use, and if you do find yourself more drawn to first these days. [I’m also wondering if it’s easier to access speculative spaces through first person?]
Karen E. Bender:
This is a great observation. When I started writing, I did write mostly in first person point of view. I loved voice-y first person perspectives and voices, like those in Catcher in the Rye and Fear of Flying; it seemed profound to me that, with these points of view, I could access a character’s consciousness. It was like a form of eavesdropping, the first person perspective and voice directly verbalizing observations and feelings that I had, or that illuminated the world for me—how could this be! This direct access to consciousness that fiction provides is different, I believe, than any other form of art. So my first narrators were first-person perspectives. Then my two novels were in third. When I started writing in third person, I felt more grown up, at the time. Third person allowed me to access characters and perspectives that felt more distant from my own experience—that felt subversive and expansive. It’s also flexible—it allows for the freedom to zoom in close to a character, to swoop back and examine a character.
I returned to more first-person perspectives in this collection, it’s true. Many of the characters are moving through and processing very strange worlds, and I was curious as to how they were reacting to them, how these dystopias affected them on an individual level. I think that’s why I accessed first. I also enjoyed playing with different types of voices—and the first person allowed me to do that, too.
Rachel León:
I know you’re very politically minded, which is something that I appreciate in you as a person, as well as your work. I see a definite evolution between your last collection, The New Order, and this latest one, but then our country is changing in increasingly devastating ways, often feeling dystopian. I wondered if that’s why this book veers so deeply into speculative fiction?
Karen E. Bender:
I’m always telling students writing dystopian fiction now that they have to outrun the current situation. They’ll come up with scenarios that are grim and frightening, but then we’ll see that is actually happening. It’s almost like our brains need to catch up, re-process, go beyond the news. It often feels like we are living in someone else’s subconscious, a world governed by emotion, not logic, and I wonder what this is doing to our imaginations. I’m always telling students, “Keep inventing. It has to be different—not necessarily more extreme, but inventive.”
As a writer, your job is to pay attention. It’s a particular kind of attention, different from the attention of other forms of work—it’s emotional, internal, and also intersects with the outside world. I think it’s important to pay attention to your unease; grappling with it, for me, is a structure for fiction.
I started out writing fiction as a realist, though I also think that realism and speculative work exists on a spectrum and some of my earlier stories had a surreal element to them. I treasure the idea of “strangeness” in writing, the idea that memorable writing in some ways mimics the logic of a dream, and I hope to weave that feel in both realistic and speculative work.
I had loved writers like Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood and Shirley Jackson for a long time, and trying more dystopian work was also about giving myself permission to try it. Also, to be honest, I saw a lot of students writing dystopian fiction and it just looked like so much fun. In The New Order, I wrote the story “The Department of Happiness and Reimbursement,” a story about the world of work and sexual harassment. Using the dystopian lens was a way to grapple with the issues but in a way that created distance for the reader. The exaggeration of the world still felt familiar to readers. They could experience the unease and frustration that I felt, but placed in this alternative world, which ultimately felt like a safer way of managing these feelings.
I studied the amazing examples of Le Guin and Atwood and Butler and Jackson, looking at the ways they examine social issues in their ways that are not real and very real. The way the image of the imprisoned child in Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” creates a feeling of horror in the reader, an indictment, it seems, of denial and injustice, or the way characters in Butler’s “Speech Sounds” move through a terrifying world where no one is able to speak. Somehow the distortion creates clarity. It’s a wonderful kind of sneakiness. The stories fool you into seeing the world anew.
Rachel León:
A related question: despite these speculative stories not being grounded in our contemporary moment, they often feel chillingly possible and close. Like, while the title story, which deals with reproductive choice couldn’t physically happen, the attacks on reproductive rights in the story are all too familiar. Maybe it’s an unanswerable question, but I’m wondering how you conceived of some of these dystopias?
Karen E. Bender:
I wrote The Words of Dr L, when Amy Coney Barrett was being confirmed and I knew that the right to abortion was in jeopardy. I felt a terrible helplessness as a citizen. I thought, How, as a fiction writer, can I grapple with this? What can fiction do? Can I do anything else besides calling my senator a thousand times? I wondered what it would be like if someone could have an abortion secretly, without medication, just with certain words; and then I wondered how words would work on the other side of the equation, how they could be used to convince women to have children. And I wanted to follow the idea that hostility to abortion was also about women’s ambivalence about having children, and then followed that into their experiences as children, with their own mothers. For me, the fun of fiction is trying to go down these rabbit holes.
Rachel León:
Whether the stories are realistic or speculative, they’re linked thematically so this very much feels like a collection, but did you, your agent, or editor ever question if such different kinds of stories could be packaged together?
Karen E. Bender:
I had the same concerns. I sent about half of the book, mostly speculative stories, to my editor, Dan Smetanka, around 2021 and he was surprised. He said, oh, they’re so different! And I thought—yes, they were and they weren’t. The common link was that they arose from my subconscious, my interests at the time. I tell students to follow this as well—follow what interests you, what’s important to you at this moment. Write from feeling. I wasn’t quite sure what the theme was then, but I started to see that they were linked by parents and children separating at different points of life. And then he said, “Why don’t you write some more realistic ones? Just to balance it.” I did that, and the themes seemed clearer then.
I feel ridiculously fortunate to be able to play in this pond of short stories, for they offer this joy for a writer—the chance to try all these ways of exploring topics. My stories are love letters to stories and writers I’ve read and responded to. This one means I love Cheever! Lispector! Butler! Jackson! Etc. Each story is a new chance.
Rachel León:
The stories deal with different parent-child relationships, often in the space of the two being separated, either physically, such as in the last story, or emotionally. What is it about this situation that you’re drawn to?
Karen E. Bender:
Life cycle events—birth, adolescence, death, seems to me to be the basis of science fiction, speculative work, in a visceral sense. I’ll give you some examples. When our son was born, the doctor said, “Well, there’s three people in the room.” It was me, my husband, and him, and then he said, “And there’s a fourth, but they don’t come through the door.” And I thought that was a funny way of depicting the completely surreal experience of birth. Another example is when our kids reached adolescence, and we’d open the door, and find one of our kids’ friends. One day they’d be three feet tall, then five feet tall, in like two weeks—there was a sense that they were changing so rapidly. They were the original aliens. And then the last observation happened after my father passed away a year ago. Just seeing his decline was devastating, and also really strange. The fact of seeing someone that you love not alive is the basis of everything uncanny, honestly, because they’re there, they look like themselves, but they’re also not. None of these experiences feel like they arise from the real world. So recognizing that inspired many of the stories in the book.
Rachel León:
I thought we could wrap up by talking about humor because while I wouldn’t necessarily call your work “funny,” it’s definitely full of humor, which I love, particularly in at times when you’re the work is wrestling with difficult subjects, which I suppose ties back to how dystopian and dire our country is these days. Can you talk about the role and importance of humor when writing about or even facing hard things?
Karen E. Bender:
Humor is, again, about paying attention, and also about claiming power. Freud says something about a joke being a release of aggression; it’s an acceptable release of aggression. After I read work by amazing writers who use humor like Philip Roth and Paul Beatty and Grace Paley and Martin Amis and Meg Wolitzer, I feel a kind of catharsis. I think humor is also about a very precise honesty, so the reader can say—oh, yes! This is true as opposed to what people say is true. Writers who use humor have good bullshit detectors. I think that truth, in all forms, has a calming effect. How do we get through life, in all of its absurdity and scariness? I think of the signs held up in protests against the administration recently—they can be marvelously creative, and show truth through absurdity. Humor is a way to see everything clearly, and clarity is a helpful tool to sustain us when facing anything hard.
FICTION
The Words of Dr. L and Other Stories
By Karen E. Bender
Counterpoint Press
Published May 6, 2025
