The Interview with Kayla Min Andrews
Is three posts to kick off the New Year too many? Probably. But that’s okay because most of us are stuck inside just trying to keep warm.
Greetings to new subscribers and welcome to Sitting in Silence, a newsletter for writers, readers, and thinkers. The interview is an ongoing feature of the newsletter. I love talking to writers about inspiration, craft, and life. They never disappoint. So, from time to time, you’ll find these intimate and enlightening conversations in this space. This issue’s conversation is with the awesome Kayla Min Andrews.
Kayla has one of the most unusual and wonderful stories of anyone I’ve interviewed. She’s a writer and scholar of writing, but she’s also a hero in my opinion. A couple of years ago, Kayla set about publishing a book by her mother, the late, great Katherine Min. That book, The Fetishist, would have disappeared if not for Kayla moving heaven and earth to bring it to the public. The Fetishist was published to major acclaim last week. Not only is Kayla a good friend, but she’s a student at Randolph College Low-Res MFA where I sometimes teach. We’re doing an event today unless an unlikely blizzard shuts down New Orleans.
My novel, The American Daughters, comes out in six weeks. I’m excited, and it’s available for pre-order today.
Lastly, I’m teaching an online class this Thursday. Sign-ups close soon. Limited scholarships are available.
As always, thank you to the premium subscribers who make this newsletter possible, especially those who just signed up. I appreciate your support. This would be much harder to do without your help.
Now, for our fantastic interview.
Maurice: What are your earliest memories of reading or writing stories?
Kayla: When I was eight, Mom gave me a notebook (it had the genie from Disney’s Aladdin on the cover) and told me to write down whatever I wanted in it—what happened to me that day, my observations, my thoughts and feelings. She said the key was to fill it up and know that what I wrote was only for me. I kept a journal on and off for the rest of my life, continuing now.
Later, when I was ten or so, Mom noticed I was reading the same Ramona Quimby books over and over, though they weren’t challenging to me anymore, so she reached out to a friend of hers in NY who worked in YA publishing, and then I remember a box of books arrived at our house—in our small town in New Hampshire—full of edgy interesting YA novels.
Maurice: It sounds like she gave you lifelong gifts. What was it like growing up with a mother who writes? Did writing seem strange to you or mundane?
Kayla: I was aware that my family was different from those around me (I grew up in a small town in central New Hampshire). The other kids' parents weren't artists, didn't spend tons of time reading and writing and discussing books, didn't necessarily use literary references when they spoke, etc... Also, Mom was Asian, in a town where virtually everyone was white. So I grew up feeling very different, and like my family was very different, from the 'norm.' I mostly felt proud to be so different, maybe because I was determined not to let anyone make me feel bad about it.
But within that, writing was all around me constantly--my dad was a creative writer, too--so it was like the proverbial fish not knowing what water is. Only more recently, as an adult, have I fully grasped how unusual (and special) it is that Mom and I read novels aloud together throughout my childhood and adulthood, that she read me her works-in-progress and we discussed them. Occasionally when Mom was upset with me (for not doing a chore when she'd asked me to, say), she'd write me a vulnerable letter expressing her feelings. This, too, didn't strike me as particularly unusual at the time. I appreciated it as an act of love; sometimes I wrote back. I grew up seeing writing as something adults did to figure things out, to express themselves, and to connect with others.
Maurice: "Fish not knowing what water is" is such a unique situation to find yourself in. To that same point, you're in a unique situation vis a vis your mother's new book. She published her first book, Secondhand World, 15 years ago. And she wrote a book that she did not publish before she passed in 2019. That book, The Fetishist, just came out, as a direct result of your efforts. It's not often that a child is able to finish the quest that their parent started. Does it feel like a gift to you? What motivated you to want to see the book live in the world?
Kayla: It feels like a huge gift, yes. In so many ways. It's like the next chapter in our relationship, proving me wrong after I thought our relationship would only exist in the past. It's like we're collaborating on a writing project together, thereby letting the magic that was Mom--magic that lived in our mother-daughter bond, among other places--spread and grow out into the world. And in the process, I'm letting some of my own magic go out into the world, in a more public way than I've ever done before.
The first thing that motivated me was Mom's writerly excitement about the essays she was writing. She stopped polishing The Fetishist as soon as she got diagnosed with cancer--literally in the oncologist's office. She realized that, in the limited time she had left, she wanted to change genres and styles, from ornate long-sentenced fiction to direct pared-down personal essays. She was working on the essay collection until her death. Literally, in her bed in the hospice center, she'd be on her laptop working on them. The urgency of this made me so sad, after her death, at the thought that the essays would never reach readers. So I eventually reached out to Mom's friends about possibly finding a way to publish them.
Once I was connected to the amazing Sally Kim, who's primarily a fiction editor, she asked about the unpublished novel (which Mom discusses in some of her essays). So I located and re-read The Fetishist. It was just a file on my laptop then, the laptop that used to be Mom's, the file untouched since Mom stopped working on it. Reading it, I got excited all over again by how beautiful and fierce it was. (I had read chapters that she sent to me out of order as she was writing them, but hadn't read the assembled manuscript.)
These days, I almost don't distinguish between The Fetishist and the essay collection, in my mind. They are both great and I intend to see them both published :) Doing the novel first makes sense because she was known as a fiction writer. With both works, I feel the right readers will enjoy Mom's special way of blending humor, heartbreak, anger, self-awareness, and literary fireworks (aka beautiful use of language, aka Mom proudly called herself a "word wanker" for how much she loved to play around with words, haha).
Maurice: I had the honor of reading The Fetishist before publication. From the very beginning, I knew I was in love. She's doing so many things with these damaged, complex characters. She's working through the experience of Asian women who are sometimes the objects of, well, the fetishists. And, my goodness, she has a way with words. From simple puns to sentences that seem to wrap around themselves and change meaning as you read. Did y'all talk about loving language and what it can do? What is your mother's style like in your eyes?
Kayla: Yes. When we read novels aloud together, sometimes she would pause to copy out a sentence or a passage that she liked into her notebook. She talked about how she loved moments that skillfully zoom out from the immediate concerns of the story to say something big and insightful about what it means to be human. We liked to joke around using puns, or elaborate sentence constructions, or using formality to goofy effect. Her style in writing is similar to her style in person—mischievous, funny, honest, melancholy yet crackling with delight, elevated but not afraid of being goofy sometimes... There's an element of noticing, of savoring, and of skipping the boring stuff and diving straight into what's juiciest. Mom liked to talk about transcendence. She identified with Madame Bovary's longing for it. She has a great essay about realizing she's kind of adolescent for wanting transcendence (or as she puts it in the essay: "The sublime, in all its swirling, cloud-lit, overwrought, mountain-top, Gothic ruination, with all its silliness and pretension, its awesomeness and sentimentality”) all the time, and not wanting to bother with the mundane. I think she has a special gift for using language to convey/create moments of transcendence.
Maurice: I agree about her using language to convey transcendence. That's one of the many great pleasures of the novel. Of course, the characters in the book are hardly transcendent. They're flawed people trying to sort their lives and desires; and they're full of life and attitude. Is there a character in The Fetishist you identify with? I keep going back and forth between Alma and Kyoko.
Kayla: Haha, I was interviewed for the Poured Over podcast the other day, and the great Miwa Messer asked me who my favorite character was, and I blurted out "I like them all equally!" as if they were listening, as if I'd offend them by choosing a favorite. It was because I was nervous. Oops!
About Alma and Kyoko-- I used to go back and forth between them, too. Then I started seeing them as representing a duality within a single person, like two different sides to who my mom was as an artist. Then a bookseller (Sally the editor passed her words on to me) said she thinks every Asian woman has an Alma and a Kyoko in her. That is brilliant and makes a lot of sense to me. And I think it's applicable beyond Asian women, too. Alma has a respectful relationship to the canon of white male composers, she uses her artistry as a classical cellist to learn and exalt these composers' works, and she gets a lot of her power and acclaim from impressing white audiences, which she does with swagger and attitude. It's a more old-school approach, and it reminds me of Mom's love of Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Conrad, Nabokov, etc., and the way she studied them carefully and learned from them, and the way she taught me to value and learn from them, too. Kyoko, meanwhile, represents a younger, newer approach of being like "F*** the canon" and being angry about a world that values white male voices to the exclusion of others, and making original art to express that anger. I saw that anger in Mom, you can see it in her work, the way it exposes and laughs at certain aspects of masculinity (like calling history a bunch of "penises on parade"!! Or hilariously characterizing the different types of Asian fetishists), and some of that anger and rebellion lives in me, too.
I also really identify with how Kyoko struggles/bounces between hope and destruction, between an inherent sweetness and an inherent darkness.
Maurice: Speaking of duality, you're both the person shepherding your mother's book into the world, and you're also a talented writer. [Full disclosure to readers: Kayla is an MFA candidate at Randolph College where I'm on faculty.] What stage of the writing life are you in? And why do you write?
Kayla: I'm currently working on a novel. I'm about a third of the way through a rough draft. I've spent a few years now writing on my own, taking community classes here and there, submitting short stories and essays to literary journals. Last summer, I began the wonderful Randolph MFA program for fiction because I wanted more guidance, structure, and accountability for my writing practice. I feel like a relative rookie in some ways, and like my whole life has been writing-centered in other ways...
Why do I write? Well, I know from experience that I tend to be quite unhappy when I am not writing. One good thing about my not doing it for ten years (I didn't write from ages 22-32): I'll never wonder what my life would be like if I gave up on writing. I know, I've been there, I'm not going back. During a dark day in the early pandemic, I remember seeing something you wrote about how, to a writer, not-writing feels like an alarm is going off all the time. There's a kind of panic-feeling. That is true for me. Also, when I wasn't writing, I wasn't able to show up as my authentic self, almost ever, with others. Because I was, in a sense, hiding my authentic self from myself. Now that I'm writing, I feel that I know myself fairly well, I know what I like, what matters to me, what I have opinions about, so that allows me to connect meaningfully with other people, which was much more difficult before.
Maurice: Ah yes. I remember that post about the alarm going off all the time (from my old days on Twitter). I was inspired by a Joanna Newsom song where she sings about letting go of love, but you can't because that bell can be heard across the ocean. The bell only stops ringing when you embrace it. I think I understand the reasons why you went back to school to get an MFA. They're very similar to my own reasons: I needed guidance, structure, and accountability, too. Is there anything you would tell writers who are considering going back to school or even just taking online classes? Is there a mindset that has helped you so far in your studies?
Kayla: What a beautiful image of that bell.
Once I realized I could start with something not very good and then through bullheaded persistence make it a little better, then a little better, until eventually it becomes a piece of writing I’m proud of, that was a breakthrough for me in terms of mindset. And part of the process of making it a little better is getting outside eyes on it, which means showing a not very good draft to someone—a friend, mentor, classmates and a teacher—and hearing what they have to say about it.
It was also helpful when I realized other people’s feedback can be like a buffet. Take what you want to eat, leave the rest. As long as you consider everything carefully, you can decide what feedback not to take.
If you’re considering a class of some kind, I’d say trust your instincts and do your research. Reflect on what you hope to get out of the class, then pursue that. Talking to people who have taken that class, or graduated from that program, can also be a great way to get a more accurate sense of what you might encounter there.
Maurice: Yes! Any piece of writing can be improved. Revision is our friend. I also love the idea of a buffet full of literary feedback. Other than writing, what brings you joy?
Kayla: Eating! Lol. Sometimes cooking. Long walks or bike rides through the city. Movies, TV shows, books. I really like the podcast You Are Good. Hanging out with friends.
Maurice: Wonderful chatting with you, Kayla! Best wishes on all your endeavors.