Ashley Kunsa Q & A with Eastern Iowa Review
Chila: Though not a lyric essay, I found your work, "How to Write Your Life in the Second-Person," intriguing and somewhat transgressive - the idea of it - quite brilliant, really. Talk about how you come up with ideas.
Ashley: I just had this conversation with my fiction writing students on the last day of class! Most of my pieces start with a line or two that comes into my head because of something I’m doing or thinking about, or a conversation I’ve had or maybe something I’ve recently seen. It might evoke a narrator’s voice, set up a conflict, lead to dialogue between characters. I get a little bit down on paper, see where things start to go, then I start thinking about the issues and themes involved, what sort of subject matter I’m dealing with, how structure might play out. That original line doesn’t always make it into the final draft of the piece, but 95% of the time some version of it does. And more often than not, it appears really close to the beginning, if not as the first line.
“How to Write Your Life In the Second Person,” for example, got its start this past semester after I’d done a lesson on point of view in my fiction workshop. I was in the shower—where I do, actually, have some of my best ideas—and the title came to me, and then I thought of the first line, and a draft of the whole first paragraph took shape before I’d turned the water off. My husband and I had been making cupcakes over the weekend, so that experience (which I reference in the first paragraph) was lurking in my brain, too. I knew it was kind of risky to go with the second person—people have such strong feelings about it, and usually not very positive ones—but it just felt right for the way I’d be tracking my development as a writer at the same time I’d be tracking a sort of emotional development, which, for writers, are often very intertwined. Because the second-person pov is so close, so personal, at the same time that it attempts to universalize, it felt like the appropriate way to convey ideas that both are very personal to me and hopefully strike a chord with a wider audience of writers, artists, creative people in general.
Chila: How did you begin writing for publication? What was your first publishing credit?
Ashley: My first publication came about as a bit of good luck—after starting my PhD in literature, I entered the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Orlando contest for flash fiction and won. The prize was a thousand bucks and publication in The Los Angeles Review. That story, “A Woman’s Glory,” is actually a short-short from my MFA thesis. This gave me the boost in confidence that I needed to believe that people I didn’t know would be interested in reading what I write. Even so, it took a while (years, actually) for me to really start sending things out in earnest. Another story of mine, for example, was a finalist in Narrative Magazine’s 30 Below contest around the same time, and while I submitted it to a couple of places over the years, it’s only recently that I got serious about sending it out to journals; happily, I placed it just this past week. Time was the main factor—being a student, teaching, then having a baby on top of that—along with never feeling like things were quite “ready.” Now though, I’ve usually got at least three or four pieces circulating at a number of places at any given time. I make it a priority.
Chila: What do you especially want to get across to your writing students?
Ashley: One thing I really found myself emphasizing this year is just how much “being a writer” is an ongoing process as opposed to some destination you arrive at. (Well, I guess unless you’re a Margaret Atwood or Cormac McCarthy or Ian McEwan.) I don’t think I ever said it in so many words, but I tried to make it evident by being a model of that kind of thinking.
This past semester, I found myself baring my writing soul quite a bit, having these frank discussions with my students about what it means to be a practicing writer—sometimes having a hard time taking criticism, but taking it anyway, and the writing being better for it; revising and revising and revising; submitting your work, getting rejections; the excitement of an acceptance; starting the process all over again with each new piece.
Doing this made me a lot more vulnerable than I’ve been in the past. I certainly didn’t set myself up as someone with this “perfect writing life,” and sometimes I’d think, Did I really just admit that? But I hope they learned something from it and took heart in seeing another writer at work, getting tripped up but also having successes and, through all of it, remaining at work. I hope they saw a real person writing in the real world and that it gave them the idea that they, too, could do it.
Chila: What's next on the writing agenda for you? Do you have specific markets you want to broach?
Ashley: This July I’m very excited to be going to the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, where I won a scholarship. Along with whatever new work I create there, I plan to focus on a story collection—traditional-length short stories and flash fiction pieces—that I’ve slowly been building. I have a few pieces at different stages in the writing process, so I’m looking forward to moving these along.
Chila: What writing tips can you share, 2 or 3 that have helped you most.
Ashley: The late Lewis “Buddy” Nordan, who was my professor at Pitt early in my college career and really my first writing mentor, and who was a great story writer and novelist, used to say that you have to be willing to risk sentimentality. You have to be willing to walk that line. I’ve held this piece of advice very close to me for almost 15 years, and while it’s a difficult line to walk—it’s easy to shy away from anything that might come across as too emotional, as cheesy, it’s a lot safer to move toward coldness and harshness—there’s such a pay-off when you crack open a moment and lay it bare and you take that chance and say, Yeah, maybe this is gonna flop, but what if it doesn’t? I think if you write without taking that risk, you’re foreclosing a significant portion of the human experience before you even begin.
Another tip I have is to just be the writer you are. People talk a lot about how many words a day you should write, how you should go about the processes of drafting and revising, etc., and while I think we can learn a lot from other writers, at a certain point—and it’s a different point for each writer, no doubt—I think one of the best things you can do for yourself is to accept who you are as a writer: your strengths, obsessions, habits, quirks, even your weaknesses. That’s not to say stop growing, stop experimenting, stop trying to write yourself out of a rut when you’re in one. Of course you need to do all of those things for the writing to stay fresh, alive. But I think there’s something to be said for nurturing yourself and responding to what really makes you you as a storyteller or a poet or whatever. Late in my MFA program, the short story writer Charlotte Holmes, who directed my thesis, told me to stop worrying so much about the things I’d gotten criticized for in workshops and focus instead on what I do well. This was very freeing advice. It allowed me to get out of the maze of my head and back to the page. I love the possibilities of language and am constantly pulled in by characters’ voices, and so these were the places I returned to, they’re the places I find myself returning to over and over. Approaching your writing in this spirit requires a certain generosity to the self, which I think is oftentimes difficult, because we can be so hard on ourselves. And it’s always a process—some days I’m more accepting of myself than others—but the more you do this, the more you’re able to renew your passion for writing and tap into those things that are essential to you as a writer.
Chila: Though not a lyric essay, I found your work, "How to Write Your Life in the Second-Person," intriguing and somewhat transgressive - the idea of it - quite brilliant, really. Talk about how you come up with ideas.
Ashley: I just had this conversation with my fiction writing students on the last day of class! Most of my pieces start with a line or two that comes into my head because of something I’m doing or thinking about, or a conversation I’ve had or maybe something I’ve recently seen. It might evoke a narrator’s voice, set up a conflict, lead to dialogue between characters. I get a little bit down on paper, see where things start to go, then I start thinking about the issues and themes involved, what sort of subject matter I’m dealing with, how structure might play out. That original line doesn’t always make it into the final draft of the piece, but 95% of the time some version of it does. And more often than not, it appears really close to the beginning, if not as the first line.
“How to Write Your Life In the Second Person,” for example, got its start this past semester after I’d done a lesson on point of view in my fiction workshop. I was in the shower—where I do, actually, have some of my best ideas—and the title came to me, and then I thought of the first line, and a draft of the whole first paragraph took shape before I’d turned the water off. My husband and I had been making cupcakes over the weekend, so that experience (which I reference in the first paragraph) was lurking in my brain, too. I knew it was kind of risky to go with the second person—people have such strong feelings about it, and usually not very positive ones—but it just felt right for the way I’d be tracking my development as a writer at the same time I’d be tracking a sort of emotional development, which, for writers, are often very intertwined. Because the second-person pov is so close, so personal, at the same time that it attempts to universalize, it felt like the appropriate way to convey ideas that both are very personal to me and hopefully strike a chord with a wider audience of writers, artists, creative people in general.
Chila: How did you begin writing for publication? What was your first publishing credit?
Ashley: My first publication came about as a bit of good luck—after starting my PhD in literature, I entered the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Orlando contest for flash fiction and won. The prize was a thousand bucks and publication in The Los Angeles Review. That story, “A Woman’s Glory,” is actually a short-short from my MFA thesis. This gave me the boost in confidence that I needed to believe that people I didn’t know would be interested in reading what I write. Even so, it took a while (years, actually) for me to really start sending things out in earnest. Another story of mine, for example, was a finalist in Narrative Magazine’s 30 Below contest around the same time, and while I submitted it to a couple of places over the years, it’s only recently that I got serious about sending it out to journals; happily, I placed it just this past week. Time was the main factor—being a student, teaching, then having a baby on top of that—along with never feeling like things were quite “ready.” Now though, I’ve usually got at least three or four pieces circulating at a number of places at any given time. I make it a priority.
Chila: What do you especially want to get across to your writing students?
Ashley: One thing I really found myself emphasizing this year is just how much “being a writer” is an ongoing process as opposed to some destination you arrive at. (Well, I guess unless you’re a Margaret Atwood or Cormac McCarthy or Ian McEwan.) I don’t think I ever said it in so many words, but I tried to make it evident by being a model of that kind of thinking.
This past semester, I found myself baring my writing soul quite a bit, having these frank discussions with my students about what it means to be a practicing writer—sometimes having a hard time taking criticism, but taking it anyway, and the writing being better for it; revising and revising and revising; submitting your work, getting rejections; the excitement of an acceptance; starting the process all over again with each new piece.
Doing this made me a lot more vulnerable than I’ve been in the past. I certainly didn’t set myself up as someone with this “perfect writing life,” and sometimes I’d think, Did I really just admit that? But I hope they learned something from it and took heart in seeing another writer at work, getting tripped up but also having successes and, through all of it, remaining at work. I hope they saw a real person writing in the real world and that it gave them the idea that they, too, could do it.
Chila: What's next on the writing agenda for you? Do you have specific markets you want to broach?
Ashley: This July I’m very excited to be going to the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, where I won a scholarship. Along with whatever new work I create there, I plan to focus on a story collection—traditional-length short stories and flash fiction pieces—that I’ve slowly been building. I have a few pieces at different stages in the writing process, so I’m looking forward to moving these along.
Chila: What writing tips can you share, 2 or 3 that have helped you most.
Ashley: The late Lewis “Buddy” Nordan, who was my professor at Pitt early in my college career and really my first writing mentor, and who was a great story writer and novelist, used to say that you have to be willing to risk sentimentality. You have to be willing to walk that line. I’ve held this piece of advice very close to me for almost 15 years, and while it’s a difficult line to walk—it’s easy to shy away from anything that might come across as too emotional, as cheesy, it’s a lot safer to move toward coldness and harshness—there’s such a pay-off when you crack open a moment and lay it bare and you take that chance and say, Yeah, maybe this is gonna flop, but what if it doesn’t? I think if you write without taking that risk, you’re foreclosing a significant portion of the human experience before you even begin.
Another tip I have is to just be the writer you are. People talk a lot about how many words a day you should write, how you should go about the processes of drafting and revising, etc., and while I think we can learn a lot from other writers, at a certain point—and it’s a different point for each writer, no doubt—I think one of the best things you can do for yourself is to accept who you are as a writer: your strengths, obsessions, habits, quirks, even your weaknesses. That’s not to say stop growing, stop experimenting, stop trying to write yourself out of a rut when you’re in one. Of course you need to do all of those things for the writing to stay fresh, alive. But I think there’s something to be said for nurturing yourself and responding to what really makes you you as a storyteller or a poet or whatever. Late in my MFA program, the short story writer Charlotte Holmes, who directed my thesis, told me to stop worrying so much about the things I’d gotten criticized for in workshops and focus instead on what I do well. This was very freeing advice. It allowed me to get out of the maze of my head and back to the page. I love the possibilities of language and am constantly pulled in by characters’ voices, and so these were the places I returned to, they’re the places I find myself returning to over and over. Approaching your writing in this spirit requires a certain generosity to the self, which I think is oftentimes difficult, because we can be so hard on ourselves. And it’s always a process—some days I’m more accepting of myself than others—but the more you do this, the more you’re able to renew your passion for writing and tap into those things that are essential to you as a writer.
Such an insightful interview with Ashley. I wish her continued success upon success upon success! ~ Chila
Ashley Kunsa's short fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from the Los Angeles Review, the Roanoke Review, Hot Metal Bridge, Blue Lyra Review, and elsewhere. She was awarded the Orlando Prize by the AROHO foundation and holds an MFA from Penn State. Currently, Ashley is completing a Ph.D. in English literature at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA.
Experimental Essay Award Winner (tie)
Ashley Kunsa's short fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from the Los Angeles Review, the Roanoke Review, Hot Metal Bridge, Blue Lyra Review, and elsewhere. She was awarded the Orlando Prize by the AROHO foundation and holds an MFA from Penn State. Currently, Ashley is completing a Ph.D. in English literature at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA.
Experimental Essay Award Winner (tie)