I first met Katharine Coldiron when she conducted a brief interview with me. Since then, our paths have crossed at conferences, and is our punishment for living in a modern age, social media. Since our introduction, I’ve grown to know Coldiron as a skilled writer and critic who is capable of moving between genres and styles with savvy flair and cutting edges. Her book Cerimonials is a breathtaking lyric novella following two young lovers with style and bite. Her books on film, Junk Film and Plan 9 from Outer Space are clever and offer smart insights. With her latest book, Wire Mothers, Coldiron presents us with a handful of tightly written short stories probing bad things—bad parents, bad choices, and bad feelings. As I’ve done with all of Coldiron’s writing, I read the collection in what felt like a heartbeat. Coldiron was kind enough to take a few moments from her busy schedule to chat about craft, broken things, and the homes we can’t seem to shake.

Did you visualize the collection Wire Mothers from the beginning or did it develop after you’d written a few stories first? 

It developed later—in some cases, much later. I noticed a few years ago that almost everything I write has bad parents in it, so I started thinking that would be a useful way to shape a story collection. I knew I didn’t want to assemble a very long or comprehensive collection, just a quick themed set, and these five really worked for the bad-moms theme. Plus, they’re some of my favorites I’ve written. 

So, less is more in this case. Do you find that some story collections are padded? 

Oh, I really shouldn’t answer that one truthfully. I’ll say that as a reader, I find full-length story collections exhausting. It’s part of why I like the Cupboard’s publications so much—just the right length! My hope is that this collection isn’t tiring even for a reader like me.

Yes, the Cupboard does fantastic work. One of the things I liked most about your book Ceremonials were the sections where the language had a fever-dream quality to it. It seems to me you cater your prose to the subject. What choices do you make when you begin writing as far as diction and word choice?

There are two ways to answer this, and both of them are a little bit, I don’t know, dubious. Seventh-chakra stuff instead of toolbox craft stuff. 

First, I believe that a sentence should always grow out of its preceding sentence, and so you grow a paragraph like a branch grows leaves. Or more like a stalk of corn grows leaves—a new one grows out of the nest of the previous ones, and it’s impossible to strip one away from the others without changing them, too. I work hard to make this happen content-wise when I’m writing, no matter the genre I’m writing in. 

So that’s content, the sentences growing out of each other. For diction, I write and (particularly) revise with my ear much more than with my eye. Robert Frost says the ear is the only true writer and the only true reader, and I’ve found that to be correct while I’m working. I try to hear the sentences as I’m putting them on the page. When I get too far away from the ear, my writing gets dissatisfying.

So, your stories grow out of the composition. Have you ever sat down and plotted through a story or do you find plot comes entirely from the exploration and revision of the work? 

Huh. I don’t think I’ve ever outlined a story in the way I’d outline a novel, although I probably should have. I don’t write a lot of stories, and they tend to be either really short, centered around a simple idea, or way too long, focused on characterization. Outlining characterization seems to have diminishing returns, and a tentpole idea is pretty easy to push through for 2,000 words with nothing but my wits, so in both cases, I get a lot more out of exploration than I do out of meticulousness. But it hasn’t dawned on me until now that I don’t do that, so I’m surprised at this insight.

Some of my writer friends swear by outlines. You mentioned you outline novels, and I’m curious how much you outline? Do you explore and create work first or outline from the start?

It depends on the project. If it’s a plotty project, I freestyle as many words as I need to in order to learn who the characters are, and then I’ll outline what happens to them. Sometimes that’s just a few chapters ahead of the day’s work, and sometimes it’s for the rest of the book. If it’s a hybrid project, I might try to outline each of the threads and then write and braid them more intuitively, but I might just seat-of-the-pants it. 

The word “outline” is quite grand for the document I’m talking about, usually—like, it could be a single page tracing the movements of the book in a phrase or so for each. Other times, it gets much more complicated. The last novel I finished was historical, so I had to plot the events of the characters’ lives next to the historical events, which are especially well-known. That was tricky and required a great deal of organization. I had a posterboard filled with different-colored sticky notes to keep me on track. 

A crucial thing I feel the need to say about outlining for anyone who is reading this for tips: outlines have to change as you write. If you stick to the outline as a higher priority than letting the book take its own meaningful forms and motion, you will end up with a well-organized piece of cardboard. Revise the outline as you write, let things drop away or add on or move around.

Do you find either form more liberating than the other?

No? I don’t know. The historical novel had some significant constraints, and some of those were great, either as a natural corset I didn’t have to build for the work, or as a force I pushed against usefully. Other constraints were very difficult to write around or through. My favorite way to write is at white heat, when I have an idea I have to get down in a frenzy and ultimately don’t need to change much, because the muse is upon me. But that’s not a sustainable way to work, it’s rare and unpredictable, and it’s in a different category than either outline or exploratory.

Have you written a story, where you’ve corn-stalked your way through it and found the diction was off? 

In a story, I don’t think so—I can’t think of an example offhand. But I did just rewrite the first 80 pages of the historical novel because I had the diction wrong early on. I thought it was going to be a more oblique novel than it ended up being, more distant and literary, and it turned out to be more immediate and commercial in style. Rewriting the beginning was torture.

You’ve written that you adore a long sentence, in this collection, you tend to bounce between short sentence bursts and longer sentences. Is there a way you balance your sentences when you edit?

That’s ear, again. Some of it I can put down to experimentation, though; these stories were written over a long period of time, during which I was continually figuring out what I wanted syntax to do for me, and if I ever wanted it to work against the reader. Sometimes I do. Variation in sentence length (and syntax) makes prose flow, and I had that in mind as I revised. Some of that variation can be natural, but sometimes you have to kink up the sentences and break them into pieces to make them flow right.

Let’s talk about caring. While reading Wire Mothers, I found myself more than once humming “Caring is Creepy” off the first Shins record. It felt oddly fitting as we see characters in your book who care for one another, but the manner in which they go about interacting with one another is quite strange or inappropriate. What is it about this boundary of appropriate and inappropriate displays of affection that fascinates you?

Phew, that’s a can of worms. I’m tempted to tangent off into Flowers in the Attic rather than answer it truthfully with regard to the collection. But I won’t. 

I think many or most of the characters who demonstrate strange or inappropriate interaction do so because something is broken inside them, and that thing is often about how they can’t control the external world. Donald in “The First Snow” has violent tendencies, so he destroys someone who doesn’t act the way he wants her to. Charlotte in “Carlotta Made Flesh” is somehow disappointed or baffled or incapable when faced with interaction in the real world, so she invents a fantasy life she has greater control over, for a while. Lily in “To-Do” wants to control her daughter—well, really she wants to control everything. She can’t, so she reaches for young children, who are fairly malleable, who must do what they’re told the way adult children don’t have to. This impulse to control is a kind of stunted version of love for each of these characters. 

All this is to say, what occupies me in this collection is the ways in which broken people attempt to love. They can’t really do it in recognizable, reasonable ways, or in ways that the recipients will want/enjoy. This can be malignant, like Donald, or it can be just…unfortunate, like Charlotte. 

But it’s why the images of Harry Harlow’s monkeys worked so well for me as a metonym for the collection. These are monkeys who don’t know what motherly love actually is. For them, the word “mother” refers to a cold, static figure that offers food. Thus they are broken: they couldn’t possibly give love to their babies the normal way, because they haven’t known it, haven’t been given it. Parental love was pretty conditional in my adolescence, so I relate to those monkeys, and in turn, to some of the characters in these stories.

I love the line “broken people attempt to love.” Aren’t we all broken though? Is it not this brokenness within in us that draws us to the characters who do unspeakable things? 

Well, having just finished binging the TV show Hannibal in less than a week, I’d have to say yes. But I’m glad you gave me the chance to clarify that these characters are broken in a more significant, behavior-twisting way than most of us are. Jamie in “Carlotta” has something broken in her, too, because otherwise she wouldn’t be cheating on her perfectly nice husband with the worst dude in LA, but she’s not, like Charlotte,  inventing a fantasy daughter with cancer. There’s a big difference between what I can imagine myself (sorta broken) doing and what I can imagine Hannibal Lecter (significantly broken) doing. 

I bet most of us have pretended to be someone else on the internet, however briefly and however young we were, and getting to take that way further than I ever would in life is part of why I enjoy being a writer. The ugly and unspeakable are always going to be interesting, and they also create pretty immediate stakes, which are useful in the short form.

One of the joys of living in a world of writers, is knowing them well enough that I feel the presences of their lived experiences in their work.  You mentioned briefly your relationship with your parents. How much of your life makes it into your writing? Is there one thing that seems to echo through it? 

I’ll never be an autofictionist, but I do mine my own life for material. Lily is loosely based on my grandmother; some of the details in the story are things she did or planned to do when I was in elementary school. The traffic misadventures Jamie gets into are based on my own when I had to drive home from a night class I took at UCLA some years ago. Even “The First Snow,” which is set in a place I’ve never been to and involves nearly all situations I’ve never been in (regular church congregation, large family)—I integrated some of my own adolescent fantasies into the main character’s interior thoughts. 

The latter question, oh, boy. I took a class with Lidia Yuknavitch some years ago and she had us do an exercise that boiled our writing down to aboutness in smaller and smaller increments. Eventually I got to the word home, and I muttered “Goddammit.” Because it always seems to come back to home for me. What does it mean, where is it, will I ever truly feel or understand the word. It’s my triggering town (per Richard Hugo), and it’s deeply annoying that no matter how I try to write about other things, I nearly always end up there. I don’t think it’s as true in these stories as it is for my longer projects, but if you look for it, it’ll be there.

Who is a character that sticks with you? One you can’t seem to write out of you?

The novel I mentioned just finishing is a book about Ilsa from the film Casablanca. She stuck with me from the film because her motivations were so poorly delineated that I couldn’t make her actions make sense. I had to write an entire novel to figure out why she’d marry Victor Laszlo, why she’d be in Paris in early 1940, et cetera. I wrote a bunch more material about her life that I didn’t end up putting in the book, but after 117,000 words I think I’m finished with her. 

It’s pretty unusual that I get obsessed enough with a character I invent myself that I feel like I want to return to her once I’m finished with the project she anchors. Even a novel I wrote for which I’ve planned three sequels—even for that, I’m trading off narrators for each book rather than sticking with the initial one. But characters other people invent…those obsessions can go on eternally. I’ll never get Dan Dreiberg or Briony Tallis or Mattie Ross out of my head or heart. Or Laura Palmer or Luke Skywalker or Buffy Summers or…

If “home” is my triggering town, an immediate second choice would be ekphrasis. A great majority of what I’ve written and published in the past several years is inspired by other media. I love writing fiction, but being in conversation with other works, following my obsessions with other people’s magnificent characters and situations, is where things really get good for me.

Bobbie Louise Hawkins always said that a writer needs other art forms. How does your writing on other media sources inform you as a fiction writer? 

I was talking about this collection with someone else recently and I realized it’s probably the last fiction I intend to write for a while that’s not directly inspired by another kind of media. I’m happier writing from and through film, as a critic or a novelist or a hybrideer, than I am writing fiction that comes solely from my brain. The film work cross-pollinates nicely with the literary work. Whereas, the work I did when I was a full-time book critic almost never had any influence on my fiction or hybrid efforts. I learned lots of other valuable stuff about writing and publishing from that period, but creatively it didn’t affect me much. 

Weirdly, it feels like the work I’m doing now that is so intertwined with film comes from an earlier part of my creative journey than the stories in Wire Mothers, before I refined my craft with grad school and whatnot. I’ve gone back to the root of things. I had to learn how most American fiction writers do what they do in order to not do that.

A friend of mine who is a psychologist told me that people tell their stories until they no longer need to. This always stuck with me because there are many tracers I see moving through my own work. My question here is honestly I don’t think you’ll be able to answer: do you think you’ll stop writing about home?

Oh Christ. No. I doubt it. It always shows up, whether I want/expect it to or not. The triggering town never gets bulldozed away entirely. 

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