Before that I had just been writing stuff in notebooks and hadn’t really shown anything to anyone. It made me feel like I could potentially be a writer, and I think that was the thing that made me feel like there was some sort of legitimacy to the whole enterprise of it. Reading a lot of stuff, talking to people, talking to other writers. I started to, but it was more of a taking-things-in period. Although I didn’t get a ton of writing done there necessarily. It was incredible to be in New York suddenly. That was very revelatory to me, just being in New York after having lived in Texas my whole life, and having lived in basically the same area since I was six years old. I think everyone can benefit from living by themselves in a new city. So we got married that May and were like, “See ya,” and split up and went to different places. It was a period of reading a ton, and my partner and I got married and then both moved to different states, because he had a full scholarship to Ohio State and I had some funding for Columbia. It was not a super productive time for me, to be quite honest.

So I went to New York and did the MFA at Columbia. I was like, “If I get into the MFA program, I’ll go.” And then I did. So I applied to this one MFA and the rest were all PhD programs to do Faulkner stuff. They were both teaching there at the same time and that seemed incredible to me. programs, and then I applied to the MFA at Columbia because I was drawn to the book The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus, which was a very strange short story collection, and also Sam Lipsyte’s Venus Drive. I was studying Faulkner and that’s what I thought I wanted to do was write Faulkner criticism, as if we don’t have enough of that in the world. I have an undergraduate in English and I have a master’s in literary criticism. I wanted to understand how she did it, and then I wanted to do it myself. Poetry was sort of difficult for me to grasp, but there was something about the way that Hempel was twisting those lines around that made me feel this electric crazy feeling. I guess the closest feeling I had before was maybe with reading poetry, but at that time I wasn’t reading a lot of poetry. There was something about the potency, how it was so compressed. I was interested in reading, but I had never had this sort of emotional, visceral response before to words on a page. It was an Amy Hempel short story and I was a freshman in college. The first time that I ever had my heart broken by words was through a short story. What is it that drew you to working with short stories?

Your book of stories, Black Light, was just longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award.

Black light book kimberly king parsons