Kim Fu: On the Connective Tissues of a Story, Anxieties Around Technology, and Her Short Story Collection, "Lesser Known Monster of the 21st Century"
“In the twelve unforgettable tales of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, the strange is made familiar and the familiar strange.” I can’t think of a better way to describe this masterful collection by Kim Fu. With sharp prose that evokes the surreal and the fantastic, Fu finds a way to keep these electric stories wildly human. Although we see a girl growing wings from her legs, a haunted doll, sea monsters, and an insomniac seduced by The Sandman, the human condition seeps through, leaving a permanent mark.
I spoke with Kim about writing this surreal collection, the connective tissues of what makes a story, anxieties and fear around technology, and her boundary pushing fiction reading recs.
While your stories in this collection range from fantastical to technological to surreal, how do you know when to follow a story? As a writer, what does that process look like for you?
The vast majority of my story ideas don’t work out on the page. It’s easy to come up with the beginnings of plots, with interesting situations, what-ifs. I think most people could sit down and generate a dozen right now. It’s a little hard to explain, but in my head, an idea that exists as a plot—this happens, then this happens, then this happens—is different from an image I can actually see, sensory details that allow me entrance into a world or a character: a hand worrying the edge of a pocket, the smell of dust burning on stage lights, a sick feeling in your gut. For me, there’s an initial barrier that takes the form of daydreaming and experimental writing, trying to find a specific moment in space and time that feels real and compels me on. And then another moment, and another, and the connective tissue that ties them together.
Most of the time, this process falls apart somewhere along the way. The story is boring, the characters are ciphers and clichés, I get bogged down in the mechanics, I don’t know where any of this is going, or most often, I just can’t see it in that way. But every now and then, I can. And then, unfortunately, the real work begins.
I love how so many of these stories feature questions about technology. We live in such a strange time now where we have so many amazing advances because of tech but we also have some sinister things going on (the Metaverse!) Can you speak about what fascinates you as a storyteller about technology?
I find that through fiction I can, paradoxically, get closer to the truth of my own anxieties around technology, the way the internet has shaped and warped my experiences and my mind, than I could by just, say, writing an opinion piece about Twitter. By amplifying certain elements, making them larger than life, they come into clearer focus. In “#ClimbingNation,” a character crashes the wake of an influencer, pretending they were friends, but that’s only a difference of degree, not kind, from the unhealthy parasocial relationships many of us have with niche internet celebrities. (Or at least, that I do!)
I also found that imaginary technologies could give murky emotions and desires a more concrete shape, a way of bringing those feelings to a head. There’s grief, and then there’s a machine that literally enables you spend one more day with a lost loved one. There are the vague, banal feelings of boredom and resentment within a marriage, and then there’s a machine lets this couple kill each other without consequence.
You have such a unique way of blending horror or surrealism with the domestic. I’m thinking specifically of “June Bugs” here (which was probably my favorite of the collection) where the grotesque - an apartment infested with beetles- is meshed with issues of abuse in a relationship. As a writer, does playing with all these elements help you make some sense of the deeper issue at hand? (*I hope this question makes sense. I was having trouble wording it so please let me know if you need elaboration)
In an earlier version of “June Bugs,” the main character, Martha, had a helpful neighbor, but a breakthrough in the writing came from turning that neighbor into someone more antagonistic, who makes Martha doubt her own perceptions, the bugs she’s seeing with her own eyes. The neighbor pushes Martha to accept what is obviously an unlivable situation.
It was important to me to get the scenes between Martha and her abusive ex-boyfriend right, everything they say and do. But again, it was the bugs, the surreal element, that let me explore their dynamic—the escalation, the horror, the resignation, the self-doubt—from a different, more heightened perspective, and get a little closer to how that dynamic actually feels, to me.
In a way, that’s the whole point of writing fiction, to express what can’t be expressed by just describing reality. Kevin Brockmeier has a story called “The Ceiling” where the protagonist’s marriage is ending, and a giant object in the sky is descending and slowly crushing the world from above. This loss is a cosmic calamity; this love is an infestation.
What was the actual process of putting this collection like? Were there stories that didn't make it in or ones you wrote later on?
A story titled “The Furies” was initially in the manuscript, but my editor and I eventually agreed that it didn’t fit with the rest of the collection. It had initially been solicited for a different project, with extremely specific parameters, and was by far the shortest and most ambiguous story, written in the second person. It just didn’t flow with the rest of the book. It’s also been interesting looking at some of my old notebooks and seeing ideas for stories that didn’t ever come together, some with fully developed plots or a lot of research behind them. A magical dressmaker came up several times, and a woman who gets trapped in a pit. Maybe I’ll write those stories someday.
All of these stories were written between 2017 and the end of 2019, except one: I wrote “Twenty Hours” in the fall of 2020, when the book was already with Tin House. I remember, the year before, hitting upon the final image of the last story in the collection, “Do You Remember Candy,” and knowing that would be the ending to the book. But “Twenty Hours” felt like the final puzzle piece in a different, thematic way, the story that clarified my vision for the whole.
Can you talk about your writing routine? Do you keep a specific practice or have a preferred writing time? How does your short story process differ from our novel-writing process?
My routine has been different for every book. For Monsters, I wrote a lot with other people—mostly writer friends, but also Meetup groups and writing spaces run by literary organizations and the Seattle Public Library. I wrote in coffeeshops, friends’ homes, library basements. I found it especially helpful to start new stories, or push past feeling blocked or burned out, in these settings. Alone at home, it was easy to deprioritize writing, to feel like it wasn’t as important or pressing as other responsibilities. I felt so energized and inspired just being around other people taking their art seriously, listening to their clacking keyboards and scratching pens. As I’ve been starting my next book, obviously all of that has changed, but I’m hopeful we’ll get there again, someday. That sense of community is still essential to me and my process.
Who are some other writers that you love that are writing the weird/pushing the boundaries of fiction?
I love Karen Russell for this, and Heather O’Neill—I’m so excited to read When We Lost Our Heads, which just came out. I recently read How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu and Walk the Vanished Earth by Erin Swan, two works of apocalyptic fiction full of wild, haunting ideas. Other mind-bending favorites, off the top of my head: In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods by Matt Bell, Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Red Clocks by Leni Zumas, Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, and The Vegetarian by Han Kang.
Kim Fu is the author of For Today I Am a Boy which won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, as well as a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice. Her second novel, The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the OLA Evergreen Award. Fu's writing has appeared in Granta, the Atlantic, the New York Times, Hazlitt, and the TLS. She lives in Seattle.
