20 Under 40 / Karen Russell

20 Under 40: Q. & A.

June 14 & 21, 2010 Issue

Karen Russell

Jennifer L. Knox

June 7, 2010

Karen Russell was featured in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 Fiction Issue. Her story will appear later in the summer.

When were you born?

July 10, 1981.

Where?

Miami, Florida.

Where do you live now?

Washington Heights, New York.

What was the first piece of fiction you read that had an impact on you?

Well, I really want to lie and say “The Count of Monte Cristo.” But it was probably “The Day of the Triffids,” a 1951 British sci-fi book, by John Wyndham. My sixth-grade class was reading this happy, snoozy tale about a girl and her horse, and my friend Michelle sneaked me the Wyndham book, which chronicles the end of the civilized world. A meteor shower blinds ninety-nine point nine per cent of the world’s population, and that’s only Chapter 1—things go way south after that. Carnivorous plants called the Triffids decide to take advantage of the whole global Mister Magoo situation and overthrow their human masters. It turns out that the Triffids are tired of being cultivated for vegetable oil and are eager to teach us a lesson in a rain of fronds and blood. I loved the apocalyptic stakes of the book. I loved the way that Wyndham took an impossible premise and blew it up into a world that felt frightening and strange and indisputably real.

How long did it take you to write your first book?

Two years, and then another six months or so of neurotic revisions.

Did you ever consider not becoming a writer?

I have a B.A. in Spanish, so briefly I thought that somebody might pay me to speak Spanish badly in another country, like Norway. 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. But I was also one of those embarrassing cases who prayed to be a writer from an early age—or, failing that, to find or invent some job for which I got to read books in air-conditioning.

What, in your opinion, makes a piece of fiction work?

I think that different pleasures work for different readers—a friend of mine won’t read anything that’s not a cardiovascular sort of page-turner. I tend to care less about plot, but I’m a sucker for humor and strangeness. I love weird or funny or beautiful sentences; Joy Williams could write a microwave-oven manual and I’m sure I’d love it, because the sentences would be tuned up like music. And I do think that great fiction, even when it’s comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.

What was the inspiration for the piece included in the “20 Under 40” series?

I was working on a novel draft for what felt like the thousandth year, doing some pretty heavy research into Florida history and the Army Corps Dredge and Fill campaign, and this little story within the story opened up. I wanted to try a sort of fantastical-historical story—Hitchcock meets the swamp.

What are you working on now?

New stories and a novel about a whacked-out imaginary town during the Dust Bowl drought.

Who are your favorite writers over forty?

Just a very few on a long list would be George Saunders, Kelly Link, Joy Williams, Ben Marcus, Jim Shepard, and whole cemeteries of the well-over-forty deceased ones.

Published in the print edition of the June 14 & 21, 2010, issue.

THE NEW YORKER