The Kathryn Scanlan Interview
By Trahearne Falvey
From her first book Aug 9- Fog, a kind of found-text collage, to The Dominant Animal, a collection of very short stories, the American writer Kathryn Scanlan has developed a distinctive prose style of startling precision. In her most recent book, Kick the Latch, published in the UK earlier this year, Scanlan captures and distils the life of a horse-trainer into a series of vignettes that Lunate’s own Jess Moody calls, aptly, ‘bar-room tales settled down into a sharp-edged prose poetry’. The novel, described by Lydia Davis as ‘a magical act of empathic ventriloquy’, confirms Kathryn Scanlan’s status as one of the most interesting fiction writers at work in English today, continually exploring and expanding the possibilities of fiction, a descendant of a lineage that includes Diane Williams and Davis herself; its composition from transcribed conversations with a real woman, Sonia, about the strange and brutal world of the racetrack, challenges received notions of form. I called Scanlan at home in California, and we talked via Zoom about genre, truth, animals and, of course, Sonia.
For your first book, Aug 9-Fog, you cut and rearranged the text of a diary found at an estate auction. Kick the Latch is also based on a real, existing life - how did it come about?
I didn’t consciously set out to write something linked to my previous work, but it does feel like a continuation of the project of Aug 9-Fog. My parents met Sonia at an antiques fair and she started telling them her stories. My mother told me about them and thought I would be interested in speaking to this person, so that’s how we met. When I spoke to her, I had a picture of the book I could make from the conversations and the idea for how I felt I would do it, the form of the book.
You’ve spoken of this book as a ‘composite portrait of a self’. Are distinctions between fiction and non-fiction something you’re interested in troubling, or ignoring?
On some days I would say I don’t feel a need to categorise it, and on other days I would say that I do like making mischief with genre and playing around with these, in some ways, silly and absurd distinctions that we make about writing that seem largely for marketing purposes. Obviously, though, there’s the author’s intention, and how she uses genre to communicate to the audience, and I do think that’s important. I do call this fiction, and I do think this is a novel, but I can also see how people might question that, and I think that’s a lovely thing.
I’m interested in this blurring between fiction and reality. I’ve been thinking about how some viewers of the film Tar seemed to be disappointed or even angry when they found out that the main character wasn’t a real composer! How do you think the fact of Sonia’s real life existence affects readers’ responses?
It does seem that a lot of the interest in the book is coming from the fact that it is based on this real person and this real life. I’m not sure why people seem to be obsessed with that these days, or maybe always, but probably a number of factors are contributing to this, including social media and reality television.
Do you think that it holds more truth? Was it important for you to be truthful to Sonia’s life?
I don’t know if I think about truth in a fictional context. I don’t know if that’s a word that really comes into my mind. Anytime that someone is writing about their life, or something that happened to them, or even just telling a story to someone, there are distortions happening. There’s necessarily going to be a very subjective view of things. It’s one thing to talk about truth in journalism but in fiction it relates more to an emotional truth, or the feeling that you are being told the truth by the person that is speaking to you. It turns into this very slippery area, I feel.
Kick the Latch is about the violence of human relations with animals, but also about love — Sonia and her horse Rowdy, of course, but also Bicycle Jenny and her chihuahuas. What draws you to writing about animals?
I’ve always been interested in animals. I grew up with a lot of animals, spent lots of my childhood alone with them, observing them and interacting with them, and I think they’re as interesting as people are.
Is there anyone who has influenced your approach to writing about animals?
It’s mostly been my own interest and my own experience of them. I was talking to someone recently about this and she brought up Coetzee who I hadn’t really read before, so in the last year or so I read Disgrace, and The Lives of the Animals, and some of his other books, and I think what he does in his fiction around animals is really interesting and the way he speaks in interviews and his vegetarianism, and the fact that he has this staunch stance on animal rights, the way he treats it in his fiction is very sharp and also very ambiguous.
Sonia moves from a very male-dominated environment, the racetrack, to another one, the prison. How much was gender on your mind when you were writing this book?
I don’t think I’m ever setting out with very specific, grand intentions when I’m writing. I’m drawn to writing about, or working with material, that is to do with gender issues. Also, I think it’s interesting how there have been some reviews of this book where the prison aspect of it doesn’t seem to come in as much. This makes sense, it’s a sort of offshoot of the race track story, but it’s a surprising and fascinating part of Sonia’s story.
One notable element of the book is the role played by white space, and the concision of your prose. Can you speak about your process of editing to reach that level of concision?
It’s largely an intuitive process, a question of combing and combing the text until I feel I’ve strained out what should be strained out, or that I’ve gotten to a place where what is on the page feels solid to me. It’s an internal sense, and about working towards that as best I can.
Has anyone or anything in particular influenced your prose style?
I found the journal NOON and the work of its editor, Diane Williams, when I was finishing school and it sort of gave me the key to figuring out how to do what I wanted to do.
And how is Sonia?
She’s doing well. I was just texting with her over the weekend. I sent her some copies of the British versions and she got those last week. She was telling me she had been reading a lot of reviews and I asked her how she felt about that, if it was a strange or uncomfortable experience. She said she really loved reading them and she just likes to hear people’s opinions.