An Interview with Kristen Arnett

I first heard an excerpt of Kristen Arnett’s novel, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One, at a “Sapphic Storytelling” event in Seattle. In five short minutes, she made us giggle and think, laugh and feel. Several years later, I’m honored to interview her in celebration of that novel’s release. Read our conversation below, where we talk about talented Floridian writers, research, and the universal truth that every bar is a gay bar.

Kira Compton: I wanted to ask about your novel process. It seems to be a common consensus that every book is its own beast. Or maybe that's a negative way of putting it—every book is its own journey? Anyway, this is your third novel. I’d love to hear how the process has been different for each one.

Kristen Arnett: It's totally fair to call it a beast. For me, it has proven to be the case.

All three of these books were completely different, like, start to finish, in how I wrote them. Mostly Dead Things was the first novel I’d ever written or even tried to write, so I didn’t know—I mean, not that I ever feel like I know what I’m doing—but I definitely didn’t know what I was fucking doing. My process was just to try and get it done. I wrote a thousand words a day, five days a week. I could write more if I felt like it, but I wasn’t allowed to write less. And I had to do it Monday through Friday, giving myself the weekend if I needed to. I did this for three months, not letting myself edit anything I wrote. At the end of that, I had something horrifically messy, but it was a draft.

My second novel was purchased on promise of completion, so then I had a deadline. I had to grind that book out and I did. I was writing around two thousand words a day, getting it done, and it just felt like a completely different thing from my first book.  

For Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One, I thought about clowns for a year. I thought about this book before I let myself do anything. I wanted to have time to let it percolate a little bit. And I told myself I wasn’t going to sit down and write it until I was ready. When that time came to sit down and work on it, I didn't stop working on a chapter until the chapter felt polished.

It felt like refining comedy bits. Because the book is very funny, and I wanted the jokes and the ideas and comedic sketches to feel clean. When a draft of the book was done and I sent it to my agent, she told me it was the cleanest book I’d ever sent her. And I was like, I know. I'm so sorry. I’ve sent you some fucking trash.

KC: It sounds like it was the opposite of that first process.

KA: It really was. I would argue that both were beneficial to me, especially because both books are about processing grief. Though I had so much fun working on this one. Thinking about how this clown processes jokes and moves through the world. It really was a little treat I gave myself, writing this book.

KC: A little clown book, just for fun.

In a previous interview, you've said that you have a love affair with research and research methods. In that year of thinking, were you just researching a ton?

KA: Kind of. I’m in the process right now of working on a new book that is incredibly research heavy. It’s more historical, which is getting back to my librarian roots.

But for Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One—which, actually, started off life as Who’s This Fucking Clown?. That was the working title. I eventually shortened it to Fucking Clown, and then Clown: A Novel. And then, working with Riverhead, we changed it to Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One.

But it started off as just a clown book, and the weird thing is that everybody has a working knowledge of clowns. Like, if you’re moving alive in this world, you have a working knowledge of clown and clownery and the popular culture of how clowns work. As a little child in the 80s, clowns were everywhere. They were at birthday parties. My bedroom had a bunch of clowns all over it. My first toy was a little clown I named Mustard, and I’d just sit and hang out with Mustard. So I started actual research—how many different types of clown are there? What’s the history of clowning?—but then I wondered what’s my own personal history with clowns? What can I draw from it? I grew up in a church background, and there were always things going on. Spaghetti dinner or choir or some Bible festival. And there were moms who would come to do facepainting with these Personas. Like, fully dressed in clown kit. You couldn’t call them, I don’t know, Mrs. Smith or whatever. It’d be Bubbles. They would only respond to their clown names. They had full personas and weren’t somebody’s mom while they were there. So when researching, I thought a lot about how absurd it is to transform into a complete different person.

It was a more expansive a kind of research because it's so inundated in popular culture. When I was researching for Mostly Dead Things, not many people had a lot to say about taxidermy. Like, a very select group of people have a lot of opinions about taxidermy. But with clowns, everyone has an opinion. It was very interesting in the ways it felt collective. This felt like more expansive and that people were like chomping at the bit to give me clown information. So it was a lot of fun. I love research in general, but this was really fun research.

KC: So, I’m not trying to bash other queer stories, but I think there are two big clichés. Either the coming out story that ends terribly, or the love story where someone dies and it ends terribly. And something I really enjoyed about Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One is that it’s not living in either of those spaces. I mean, obviously there are trials and tribulations and grief, but it never wallows in it, and it never feels the need to justify its queer characters.

KA: I’m always interested in different queer stories. I mean, I’m a writer of them, but I’m also a reader of them. Whenever I work on a project, I want to watch how queerness moves through the world. Since I’m queer, everything I make is queer. Every place I go. Like, I was talking to a friend the other day, and I said every bar is a gay bar if I’m in it.

KC: Oh my gosh, I want to steal that.

KA: Feel free. It’s the honest truth. Every book I read is a gay book because I’m reading it. Any place I am or anything I’m doing is inherently queer because I’m part of it. Writing these kinds of stories is important and interesting to me. I’m interested in these messy characters because I think people are complex and weird and fucked up. I mean, there’s nobody that’s not having a fucked up time right now. But even so, thinking about the way a character’s queerness speaks to this particular person or changes they ways they grapple with stuff.

I also wanted to use clowning to elaborate on her queerness. How she thinks about gender presentation, who gets to tell jokes and who doesn’t get to tell jokes, her relationship with her mom (who is also gay). How does queerness work inside of families with multiple queer members, since everyone is different? Queerness isn’t a monolith, and there’s not one way to be queer.

I wanted to hone in on aspects of Cherry’s queerness, but at the end of the day, it serves her a bit in the way she communicates with the world, and the way she clowns. It’s in first person because she’s telling jokes to the audience. It had to be very voicey, very hanging-out-at-a-bar. But then there are a few moments where she unpacks a little—not that she’s a character who wants to do a ton of unpacking. A little is a lot for her.

I just think it’s one of those things where you need to be really obsessive. At least for myself, the only way I see a project through to completion is if it's something I'm completely invested in. Unreliable narrators, or taxidermy, or, with this book, clowns. I’m obsessed with the way the clown is a metaphor for a lot of different things. I live in Florida, and I write all my characters inside of Florida. There's a lot of clownery happening in this state all the time, of a lot of different kinds of capacities. Easy to see it everywhere, truly.

KC: I was going to ask about Florida. The story you have in our upcoming issue is set in Florida, and then your books are all set in Florida. I wasn’t sure about all your short stories—

KA: Pretty much everything I’ve written, I’ve written here.

KC: Okay, exactly. What does being a Floridian writer mean to you? You seem very proud of it.

KA: It's deeply meaningful to me. I'm a third generation Central Floridian. I deeply love living here and being from here. That doesn't mean that I'm not continuously disappointed or heartbroken or upset or ashamed about things that happen. Those two things can happen simultaneously—I want to be very upfront that I can love Florida and hate a lot of the different ways things work here. Obviously our government has tons of issues, but then there’s also this profoundly large queer and trans community here.

And it’s a legitimately beautiful place. I love the outside here. How it’s wild and feral and it feels like me. At any point, you can see something alive or growing or crawling, either inside or out. I feel a refreshment here I don’t feel anywhere else.

I always say that if Florida starts to bore me, I’ll stop writing about Florida. But that’s one thing Florida’s not ever going to be. It’s a lot of things, but it’s not boring. I like writing about here and being an unofficial brand ambassador for the state of Florida. There's like a lot DIY grassroots kind of efforts to be do art here, and people don’t talk much about it because it’s easier to do like a sound bite or clickbit thing about how shitty it can be.  

We also have so many cool Floridian writers right now. It feels like a real renaissance moment. We’ve got Lauren Groff right down here in like Gainesville and she's running The Lynx. There’s Laura van den Berg, and T Kira Madden, who is such a God damn star. There’s Jaquira Diaz, Dantiel Moniz. Edgar Gomez—I mean. There’s just so much good work here that awesome and deeply, deeply Florida. It makes me excited.

KC: Okay, last question: any advice you have for writers early in their careers?

KA: There’s a lot of things to say, but the first one is that you can’t let rejection stop you. Not just in the writing world, but in the art world. It’s a lot of no all the time. That can be hard, especially on young writers who don’t hear it as not this, not right now. They hear it as no to you. No to your work all the time. That’s not the case. Not everybody is your reader, but there’s going to be people who want to see your work.

I also think it’s a good thing to surround yourself with an uplifting writing community that’s going to celebrate you and make you feel like the best version of yourself as a writer. Not just having other people read your work, but engaging in their work and continually lifting each other up. It’s such a fucking shit show out here all the time. To have these spots where you can feel like you at least have these communities and can care for each other, where you want to see them succeed as much as they want to see you succeed. It’s crucial.

Buy Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One here, or anywhere books are sold.