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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. When we invited Margaret Atwood on the show last month to discuss her new short story collection, Old Babes in the Wood, she told us that there was one writer whose short story she'd been reading and really enjoying, our next guest, Pulitzer Prize finalist, Kelly Link.

Link has made a name for herself as one of the contemporary masters of the short story, with tales that often contain fantastical, mystical, or downright spooky elements. It felt natural for her latest collection., Link turned to fairy tales for inspiration. Titled White Cat, Black Dog, the book contains seven retellings, a fairy tale spinning familiar lore into something completely new. For example, a piece titled The Game of Smash and Recovery takes characters based on Hansel and Gretel, but they're an outer space.

Others take inspiration from less familiar source material from Scottish folk songs to Scandinavian fairy tales. In Link stories, anything is possible. A man descends to suburban hell to find his missing husband. A woman is stuck in an airport for four days. A talking white cat becomes a beautiful woman only after you chop her head off.

Kirkus calls White Cat, Black Dog a "enchanting, mesmerizing, brilliant work."

Kelly Link will be speaking tonight at Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Green at 7:30. She'll be in conversation with Carmen Maria Machado. First, she joins me now on All Of It. Kelly, welcome.

Kelly Link: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: Let's go back to when we were a little. What is a fairy tale that left a really big impression on you as a child?

Kelly Link: I had a book, I believe it was a Reader's Digest anthology of fairy tales that I still have. I loved all of them, but East of the Sun, West of the Moon was always one of my favorites.

Alison Stewart: Why was that?

Kelly Link: I think I loved the idea, maybe the idea of travel. Somebody's husband-to-be disappears. She has to go in search of him all over the world. She's helped by the North Wind and different animals. It just felt very exciting.

Alison Stewart: That's one that you did take on and that you did turn into Prince Hat Underground, correct?

Kelly Link: I did. Prince Hat Underground is a variant actually of East of the Sun, West of the Moon. There is actually a variant fairy tale called Prince Hat Underground, which I loved so much that I took it as the title of my story too.

Alison Stewart: When you first sat down to think about this work, how did you find all these fairy tales? Obviously, some are from your childhood, but I'm assuming you went on a little bit of a research mission.

Kelly Link: I did. All of these stories began as stories first, and then I would very pleasurably think about fairy tales that might work to organize or frame the story about the people that I wanted to write about. I had a great deal of help. I have a couple of friends who are writers in Western Massachusetts, and I would brainstorm with them. I would say, "What are some really interesting fairy tales that might work with this premise?"

Alison Stewart: What was a fairy tale that you learned about for the first time over the course of working on this that you thought, wow, that's a story?

Kelly Link: The one that I needed to be reminded of was The Boy Who Did Not Know Fear, which is a very, very strange fairy tale, a very [unintelligible 00:03:56] fairy tale about a man who has never been afraid of anything. When he finally marries, he comes to the marriage bed and his wife throws a bucket of eels, live eels over him. That is how he learns fear.

Alison Stewart: You turn that one into--

Kelly Link: I turned it into The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear. I had an idea for a story and it really felt like that would be an interesting premise to explore.

Alison Stewart: That one is the one that takes place in the airport, correct?

Kelly Link: Yes, which is based on my own personal experience of being stuck in the Detroit Airport for I think four days with many other people.

Alison Stewart: Oh. What was the story behind that?

Kelly Link: [chuckles] I believe that there was a really bad system of storms, which were grounding pilots. The airport was full of people who came every day to try and get on planes, and I was one of them. I was very lucky I got a hotel room, but I treated trying to get on a flight back to Massachusetts as if it was my job, which it was. Every day I got- I was turned- I would wait all day in the airport and then I'd go back to the hotel.

Alison Stewart: What did you observe about human nature in those four days?

Kelly Link: Do you know, there was a lot of solidarity. People passed information around. People told tragic stories. There was one family who had come from the UK to go to Disney World. They had gotten stuck in the airport and now they were trying to get back to the UK. They had never made it to Disney World. You would talk to people and you'd say, "Do you know if they've made it back to the UK yet?" There was a real feeling that everybody was in it together.

Alison Stewart: It's so interesting in those group dynamics. Once we get past the, I'm scared and your own self-survival instincts kick in and then the next step, it's very interesting. People do want to help each other, or you do want to find solidarity and maybe even humor.

Kelly Link: Yes. There was some joking. I think everybody was, at least that I observed, was as patient as they could be. They understood that it was not the fault of the flight attendants or the people at the desks. Maybe I'm misremembering this. I'm sure that there were some jerks, but--

Alison Stewart: Let's roll back to fairy tale. Sorry, I went on that tangent. That was just a fascinating story.

So many fairy tales are really about trying to almost scare children into certain behaviors. Don't talk to strangers because they might be a wolf dressed like a grandma, or don't go walking in the woods by yourself, oh, Hansel and Gretel, because you might get lost and get hurt. How did you think about that idea, if you did it all, that the cautionary aspect of fairy tales?

Kelly Link: I think that there is a real balance between the fairy tales that are cautionary and the fairy tales that celebrate people being polite to old ladies, being kind to animals, being rewarded for being good citizens, or doing the right thing. Then yes, there's the other side, which is, here's what happens if you're not polite, here's what happens if you go off the path.

My last collection was called Get In Trouble and was really about people behaving fairly badly. What I realized when I began thinking about this collection as a whole is these are people who are trying really hard to do things out of positive feelings; love, family. They may not always succeed, but I really felt a great deal of sympathy for these characters.

I will admit, I also feel sympathy for people who behave badly sometimes. At least I'm very interested in them. I do like the part of fairy tales, which is about adventure and exploring the world, and coming into a sense of the kind of person you would want to be.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Kelly Link. The name of the new collection is White Cat, Black Dog. The first story in the collection is titled The White Cat's Divorce and it's based on a story, the White Cat. It's one of those stories in the book that really does read like a fairy tale.

You have to buy right in that someone would stumble across a group of cats who can talk and grow marijuana. [chuckles] That's part of the story, but it really is this rich man who gives his three sons a series of increasingly impossible tasks in order to determine who will inherit his wealth. They just really want to make their dad- to your point, they want to try to make their dad happy in some way. At least the youngest son does. Would you read the first couple of pages?

Kelly Link: I would be happy to. This is from the beginning of the White Cat's Divorce, which is based upon the fairy tale of the White Cat.

"All stories about divorce must begin some other place, so let us begin with a man so very rich. He might reach out and have almost anything he desired as well as many things that he did not. He had so many houses, even his accountants could not keep track of them all.

He had private planes and newspapers and politicians who saw to it that his wishes became laws. He had orchards, islands, baseball teams, and even a team of entomologists whose mandate was to find new species of beetles to be given variations on the rich man's name. For if it was true that God loved beetles, was it not true he loved the rich man even more? Was his good fortune not the proof of this?

The rich man had all of this, and more than I have space to write. Anything you have ever possessed, know that he had this too. And if he did not, he could have paid you whatever your price was in order to obtain it. All man desire to be rich. No man desires to grow old. To stave off old age, the rich man paid for personal trainers and knee replacements and cosmetic procedures that meant he always had a somewhat wide-eyed look as if he were not a man in his 70s at all, but rather still an infant who found his life a cascade of marvelous and surprising events.

The rich man had follicular unit transplantation and special creams to bleach age spots. For dinner, his personal chef served him fish and berries and walnuts as if he were a bear and not a rich man at all. Every morning, he swam two miles in a lake that was kept by an ingenious mechanism at a comfortable temperature for him throughout the year. In the afternoons, he had blood transfusions from adolescent donors, these transfusions being a condition of the scholarships to various universities that the rich man funded.

In the evening, he threw lavish parties surrounding himself with people who were young and beautiful. As he grew older, his wives grew younger, and in this way for a time, the rich man was able to persuade himself that he too was still young and might remain so forever.

But although a man may acquire younger and ever more beautiful wives who will maintain the pretense that he too is still untouched by age, this rich man had a long time ago, been married to a first wife, and this first wife had had three sons.

The three sons, having been raised with every advantage by caregivers and tutors and therapists and life coaches paid to adhere to the best principles of child rearing were attractive, personable, and in every way, the kind of children that a father could have regarded with satisfaction and yet the rich man did not regard them with satisfaction. Instead, when he looked at his three sons, the youngest of whom was now 19, he saw only the proof of his own mortality.

It is difficult to remain young when one's children selfishly insist upon growing older. To make matters worse, his sons were all in residence, the house where the rich man was spending the winter. The eldest was in the middle of an acrimonious divorce, his first, and the second was hiding out from the media, while the third had no good reason at all, except that he truly loved his father and wished for his approval. Also, he had flunked out of university. Everywhere the rich man turned, a son was underfoot."

Alison Stewart: That was Kelly Link reading from White Cat, Black Dog. It's fun to hear you read out loud because you can imagine in a fairy tale there once was a king, who lived in a castle surrounded by gold and tapestries and knaves, and this.

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Kelly Link: You've got it absolutely down.

Alison Stewart: What did you notice about the structure of a story, of a fairy tale, that was useful to you and that you really thought I'm going to infuse this in my fairy tales?

Kelly Link: Well, for one thing, fairy tales leave out the boring parts. Everything that happens is lively and interesting. They often have a pattern of three; three sons, three attempts to do something. They often have a comic feeling as well, like an operata or something. You just feel that life is a little bit larger. The language tends to be, as you were pointing out, melodic and spritely.

Alison Stewart: Why was that the right story to start your collection?

Kelly Link: Do you know? That was the first story. I had written two stories before this. This was the story where I decided that I was going to consciously pull in fairy tales. I wrote it for an exhibit of contemporary fairy tale art. It was going to go in the catalog, and I started thinking that it was so much fun to do.

I was currently working on a novel at the same time, which was not a great deal of fun. Novel writing is hard, so I thought, well, I'm going to do something where I can take short breaks every once in a while, and I'm going to not always use this tone, this fairy tale voice, but I'm going to deliberately engage with fairy tales.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Kelly Link. The name of the new collection of short stories is White Cat, Black Dog. Kelly will be at Green Light Bookstores on Fulton Street with Carmen Maria Machado tonight at 7:30 PM, but we'll continue our conversation with Kelly Link after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest this hour is Kelly Link. Kelly's latest short story collection is called White Cat, Black Dog, and tonight Kelly will be at Greenlight Bookstore on Fulton Street with Carmen Maria Machado, another excellent writer. That is happening at 7:30 PM.

Many people are familiar with the disneyfied versions of fairy tales, and you forget how dark they could be. Cinderella, for example, some of the stepsisters cut off their toes to fit in the slipper. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is just entirely different than Snow-White and Rose-Red. I remember the first time I read Snow-White and Rose-Red, I was like, "What is this?" How did you want to think about that spookiness, about some of those dark corners of fairy tales in your retelling of stories?

Kelly Link: I honestly think that this is why I am drawn to fairy tales. The uncanny or the spooky is sort of the neighborhood as a writer that I live in. My neighborhood is always a little bit Halloween at least in my head. When I was a kid, I loved those parts of the fairy tales that they were shocking to me, but really interesting, the idea that people could want something so badly that they would do something like cut off their own toes. I thought, "What must it be like to want something that much?" Obviously not a great decision, but really interesting to think about.

Alison Stewart: Well, since you were into Halloween and scary things, this brings to me my question about what your depiction of hell would look like because in Prince Hat Underground, a man comes to suspect- Gary comes to suspect that his husband has been dragged down to hell by an ex-fiancée who happens to be the queen of hell. You created your own version and it seems a lot like suburbia. What attributes did you want this hell to have?

Kelly Link: Do you know, all the details about hell, I think came from my years as a teenager. I was a teenager in the '80s, Jazzercise, suburban sprawl in Miami and then in North Carolina, these houses that all had a similar feel. That was where my mind went. It seemed like a great deal of fun. I think that there have been so many great depictions of an otherworldly really strange and scary hell that I wanted to move in a slightly different direction. I think that hell can be anywhere depending on what's happening there and the people who live there. That was my starting place for that.

Alison Stewart: What would currently be hell for you?

Kelly Link: Oh, I don't know. Maybe a cruise ship. That would be a pretty hellish place to be.

Alison Stewart: Don't like being stuck.

Kelly Link: No.

Alison Stewart: Do not like being stuck. I'm curious about the- what changes in a fairy tale when the narration goes to the first person as opposed to someone sort of omniscient, "Once upon a time. Let me tell you a story, gather around," What changes?

Kelly Link: I think that fairy tales in their original form, the characters may lend themselves to psychological readings, but there's very little interiority. You don't get a lot of sense of what complicates them as individuals. When you move to first person, you open up all this space, all this territory that isn't present in the original fairy tale. You can use that to comic effect. You can use it to sort of show the tragedy of somebody's life. The fairy tale accommodates that when you work with it. It's just it wasn't present in the original.

Alison Stewart: The White Road is based on a fairy tale called the Musicians of Bremen. Fully I was ignorant to this fairy tale. I didn't know it. I had to go look it up. I'm going to guess that maybe there's somebody listening who also does not know what it's about. How does this fairy tale go, the original?

Kelly Link: It is about a group of poorly-treated animals. There's a rooster, a pig, a donkey. Those are the ones that I always remember. They band together and they set out to make something of themselves. At some point, they end up in the house that belongs to- or they're set upon by robbers in this house. They make a great deal of noise so that the robbers are frightened off. They believe that they are evil spirits or ghosts. Then the animals settle down and become musicians. It's a comic. It's a very slight fairy tale. It stuck with me when I was a kid, but probably because I liked the illustrations. I wanted to make something very different of that. I wanted to make it more of a tragedy.

Alison Stewart: What made you want to take it down the tragic road? Pardon the pun.

Kelly Link: I had an idea in my head about-- I often begin a story with an image, and my image in my head was a group of actors on a stage improvising that one of them had died and was lying there in a coffin. I thought, well, why are they on this stage? What's the story here? The image was comic enough that I thought, but what makes it an actual tragedy, because a funeral is a tragedy. That was the road I went down.

Alison Stewart: It's so interesting you interrogate yourself to get to the next place.

Kelly Link: Every writer has a slightly different method, but I like to begin with an ending or with a moment and then think, well, why are they in this space? What genres can I use to tell a story about these people in this place?

Alison Stewart: My guest is Kelly Link. The name of the collection is White Cat, Black Dog. There's a couple of themes that come through this collection. It's love, death, mortality. Those are all things we really can't avoid in real life. What makes the idea of a fairy tale, the telling of a fairy tale a good vehicle for talking about love and death and mortality, things we can't escape?

Kelly Link: That's a great question. I think that almost any genre can be used to examine those things, but that's the basic building blocks of all fiction, the things that we think about most or that we care about most. Fairy tales, though, are a good vehicle because they're entertaining. Their primary purpose is I feel delight. I think that there's value in trying to write something that will be pleasurable at the same time that you are tackling large things.

Alison Stewart: The Game of Smash and Recovery is based on Hansel and Gretel. You tell us that right up front, but it's in space. I'm not sure people necessarily think Hansel and Gretel when they're reading this. How did you come up with the idea of Hansel and Gretel in space?

Kelly Link: There's a science fiction writer whose work I love, Iain Banks, very political, very enjoyable space opera. I wanted to try something in the mode that he wrote in. I wanted it to be a story about what it means to be human. I agree that maybe the connections to Hansel and Gretel are very loose, but it is about children who have been abandoned by their parents trying to make their way towards a safer place. It is, maybe of all the stories, a little looser and maybe a little bit more attached to the genre of science fiction in a way that complicates the original fairy tale.

Alison Stewart: How do you know when a story is done? If you've written a short story, how do you know this is it, yes, okay, press send?

Kelly Link: I feel that as I have continued to write, I've been writing for a long time now, that there's a voice in my head or a little bell and it's like the done bell. Just as I write a sentence that feels like the right sentence, the voice in my head will say, okay, that works. Or the voice will say, no, that really is not the right direction. Or it will say, this is an okay placeholder, but you're going to have to come up with a better idea. Then eventually then that voice is loud enough about the entire story that I can-- It's not that I think necessarily it's perfect. I think, okay, I've done in the story what I hoped I would do.

Alison Stewart: You mentioned your small group of writers, your friends, your fellow writers, Holly Black and Cassandra Clay are two really well-known fantasy writers. How does working with them on a very specific regular basis help you as a writer?

Alison Stewart: Well, one, it's great to look across the table and see that somebody else is either pleased with what they're doing or else they're struggling and miserable. Misery does love company, especially writers, but also we will stop and talk about our work with each other. We will say, "I can't figure out what to do here." What we do know is one of us will say, "Well, I recognize you have a problem here. Here's a bad idea for how you could fix it." Then we will start throwing out some really ridiculous bad ideas that the writer is not going to want to take necessarily, but they may point them in the direction of something that they could do and that loosens up something.

If somebody is giving you bad ideas, they're often much better than middle-of-the-road okay ideas where you're like, "Yes, that could work, but it's not very interesting." If somebody throws out a loony wild idea, you're like, "Well, that doesn't work, but that really makes me think about doing another big thing, which might be great."

Alison Stewart: Is it true that these writing sessions take place in a barn?

Kelly Link: They often do. My friend, Cassie, lives in a house that is not huge, but the house came with a barn. She converted that into a beautiful working space, and so we often do meet there. We used to meet in cafes, and now we meet in a barn.

Alison Stewart: Writers in a barn. Feels like a title of a show or a short story. Since you were shouted out by Margaret Atwood on our show, I'm going to ask you to pass the torch along and recommend some other short story writers that you're really liking or admiring right now.

Kelly Link: Oh, and I should say that I absolutely love Old Babes in the Wood. I love that collection. The admiration is very much mutual. I am going to recommend a novel first, while I think of a short story collections that I love. It's a novel by Megan Giddings called The Women Could Fly. It's a contemporary novel about the persecution of women in the US because they are witches. Women actually can become witches in this book. It's really a luminous, gorgeous novel. Oh, I can't believe it. I love short stories and yet I'm totally blowing it right now.

Alison Stewart: It's okay. You're not blowing it. You gave us a great novel that someone on my team just said, "I love that book," so there you go.

Kelly Link: Oh, I'm glad.

Alison Stewart: Kelly Link's new collection is White Cat, Black Dog. Tonight, Kelly will be at Greenlight Bookstore in Fulton with Carmen Maria Machado. That happens at 7:30 PM. Kelly, thank you so much for spending time with us today. This was an absolute pleasure. Thank you.

 

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