Karen Russell
Karen Russell
Karen Russellis an American novelist and short story writer. Her debut novel, Swamplandia!, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She was also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" in 2013...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth10 July 1981
CountryUnited States of America
clinic love loving tracts turns worked
I also love animals, and I worked at a veterinary clinic for a while, but it turns out that loving animals and removing deflated basketballs from the intestinal tracts of animals are two very different skill sets.
believe fantastic learned literal people stories wild work
In workshopping short stories I learned how to get character down, and how to work with ratios of literal to fantastic to make a world that people can believe in even if it's a little wild or out there.
past reality talking
Whenever someone asks me about fantasy versus realism, I'm like, "I don't know, guys. Did we not all just descend into some underworld, watch strangers from our past kaleidoscope through us according to some pattern that is both illogical and has its own strange melting truth, and then wake up and have a Pop-Tart?" Why are we talking about fantasy and reality like they're opposed?
book thinking decision
So much of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it's more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum.
long red realist
It's funny, for a long time I would go watermelon-red and deny that I was a magical realist. It felt imprecise to me, a misrepresentation.
black hunters fiction
I'm probably a lot closer than perhaps the contents of my early fiction suggest to a jaded Denny's waitress with smoker's-lung-black humor than a ghost hunter.
thinking views people
I do think that I have a more flexible view of the interactions between people, and between human and non-human protagonists, humans and their landscapes.
growing-up ocean imagination
Growing up, Catholic church really was such an incubator for my imagination, because all of those mysteries felt embedded in this insanely green, tropical landscape: the ocean nearby, the giant banyan trees. It all felt part of one seamless mystery to me.
training outsiders felt
I often felt myself to be an outsider, which is great training for all writers.
character reality process
When I'm drafting, I suppose it's an intuitive process - figuring out when something just has a surreal glaze on it and when it grapples with something that could threaten a character's day-to-day reality.
fall writing might
Sometimes, when you're writing sentence by sentence, you're not really sure what footprints you're going to fall into, or what ghosts might appear.
kids animal self
No, I don’t have to tell a soul about this, I promised myself. When you are a kid, you don’t know yet that a secret, like an animal, can evolve. Like an animal, a secret can develop a self-preserving intelligence. Shaglike, mute and thick, a knowledge with a fur: your secret.
one-thing ifs
If you're gonna do something weird, just have one thing be weird.
brother sibling understanding
I am extremely close to my brother, Kent, and my sister, Lauren, who have been remarkably understanding about all of my weird sibling tales.