"Taking my mind on a walk"
an interview with Drue Heinz Literature Prize winner, Kelly Sather
Today, I’m excited to share an interview with the 2023 Drue Heinz Literature Prize winner, Kelly Sather, which digs into her writing and mindfulness practices. I’d love your suggestions of people I might feature here, so feel free to email me with ideas. You can just reply to this newsletter. ✨✨
I first met Kelly Sather at the Bennington Writing Seminars many moons ago. I remember absolutely loving the work she shared in our student readings. When I learned that her debut short story collection had won the 2023 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was about to be published by University of Pittsburgh Press, I sent her a WOOHOO on Instagram and we planned to connect at her celebration event in Pittsburgh. On a brisk Valentine’s day night last month, Kelly read from her firecracker of a book, Small in Real Life, at White Whale Bookstore, and we talked about her book, her writing process, and how she develops such realistic, maddening characters.
After the event, we found a bar down the street, with no seats left except for two little chairs tucked in by the jukebox. While we dodged the obnoxious, near-constant flash of the photographer the place had hired to take pictures of guests during the Valentine’s dessert tasting, we bonded over the fact that we’re both chronic migraine sufferers (and thus needed to help each other dodge said flashes). We caught up about where our lives had taken us in the intervening years, and connected over the anxiety and excitement of charting out new directions in life.
If you don’t know Kelly’s writing yet, I highly recommend getting a copy of Small in Real Life. Deesha Philyaw, who selected this book to win the Drue Heinz prize, writes, “every story surprises and unsettles.” Yes. The book “invokes the myth and melancholy of southern California glamor” and is rooted richly in that particular place and landscape.
Garth Greenwell says of her book that “it has a rare wisdom, born from freedom from illusions most of the rest of us can’t bear to let go of.” In each story, Kelly tangibly evokes her characters’ illusions, then lets us witness the fragility of those illusions under pressure. Her characters made me have to put down my book more than once because I was so frustrated by their choices. I even lost a few hours of sleep after finishing the story “Red Bluff” because I was so mad at Tessa Dean, and spinning out about how she could possibly turn around the situation she’d gotten herself into by the end of the story. Kelly trains an unsentimental yet compassionate eye on her characters, drawing out their complicated humanity in a way that seems effortless. After finishing Kelly’s book, I felt that I was looking at everyone around me with new eyes. In this interview, Kelly helps us do much the same as she shares her writing and mindfulness practices with us.
What is your writing practice like? Do you have any writing rituals?
I write in the mornings at the desk, usually on my computer with a notebook nearby for random ideas. Or when I get stuck on what to do next, I’ll write out what I’m sensing about a character or scene or setting to see if that gets me going again. I’ll write word lists in the notebook, too. I have a big Websters dictionary beside the computer, and I look up words anytime I’m trying to get at an idea and can’t quite reach the language. Sometimes I’ll bounce back and forth between the dictionary and a thesaurus.
Years ago, I read a John McPhee essay on revision, and he described boxing words and phrases if they sounded wobbly or generic while reading printed drafts, and then he’d look them up in the dictionary for other approaches. I do that as well. It’s great to have another place to look besides inside my own mind.
What kind of writing are you working on? Are you working on specific projects or journaling or something else?
I started a novel last year while finishing the copy edits on my story collection. I wanted to try something big and unwieldy and move through time with it. I’m surprised by how much I like writing into the spaciousness, which used to unnerve me. I have a few essay drafts I’m chipping away at; they are going slowly.
What helps you when you get stuck with your writing?
I’ll write out in the notebook what I already know, and sometimes a detail comes up and offers a new trail to follow, or I leave altogether and walk the dogs, call a friend, read a book. I’ve started keeping a few poetry books on my desk and reading a poem before I start writing or when I get stuck. Right now, I have Now Do You Know Where You Are (2022) by Dana Levin and Frank: Sonnets (2021) by Diane Seuss. Reading poetry to me is like the good part of jumping into cold water, when I feel that thrill of aliveness.
What are your mindfulness practices?
About four years ago, I started meditating in the mornings. I started during a hard time and came to meditation almost as a survival instinct. But I think I’ve continued because of the opening I feel in my mind, or really my body, and its settled me in ways that have led me to feel more connected to community.
I also like the patience and equanimity and acceptance, and by that I mean I’m often not feeling any of those things and I can say, well, okay, there are these totally normal even if undesired feelings or experiences going on right now and we know they will change because things are always changing. Maybe meditation is teaching me how to take my mind on a walk to get some air.
How often do you practice mindfulness and when/where?
I’d say every day in some form. Mornings when I get up, I’ll listen to a recording (I’m kind of dependent on the apps), or when I’m walking the dogs, I pay attention to the trees and the clouds to feel some expansiveness.
This practice sounds very light and airy and Californian!
What do you do when a mindfulness practice doesn't seem to be working?
Breathing. I really didn’t like the idea of focused breathing, counting out during inhales and exhales, it just seemed, well, forced. But then as I tried these breathing patterns a few times, they calm me in a way that nothing else can, and within a few minutes. The 4 to 7 or 8 inhale/exhale breath count is my how to go back to sleep in the middle of the night trick.
Do you see your writing and mindfulness practices as connected and in what ways?
I’ve learned to be easier on myself about the writing when it’s not coming together. Also, I’ve always been curious about my unconscious, how those understandings come onto the page in writing, and now even more so.
Are there any books or podcasts that you would recommend to readers?
When I started meditating, I needed the apps desperately. I had called a friend who meditated and asked her how she did it, she said seventeen minutes a day for her, so I decided to work towards that. I literally lasted three minutes in those first weeks and then slowly came to a daily twenty-minute meditation. I do move around the apps: Headspace and Ten Percent Happier are ones I keep returning to. Joseph Goldstein says one word and I relax. I also read more about mind/body, right now I’m reading and recommend The Wakeful Body by Willa Blythe Baker.
A prompt from Kelly:
A few years ago, a painter friend urged me to try painting. I thought not a chance. I had no idea how to paint. When I kept ignoring her, she sent me a link to an artist teaching nearby out of her garage. So I emailed the artist, I went to the garage, I tried painting.
It turned out I didn’t care that I had no idea what I was doing, and she just gave me a place and the supplies to do whatever I wanted. I painted squiggly lines over a white page and felt better afterwards. I bought watercolors and paper and started painting at home, on the kitchen table.
I still don’t know what I’m doing, and I think that may be part of what’s thrilling me. I discovered that even making a circular motion with a thick art pen on paper for a few minutes changes my mood. Another kind of moving my body and creating, with an outcome that doesn’t matter. Watercolors are magic because you add a few drops of paint and a few drops of water into a dish, dip a one inch thick flat brush, run it across a page of watercolor paper, and the colors ripple out in their own saturating ways.
So I will share a friend’s wisdom, a new form of moving your hand across a page:
Try painting or drawing with markers on a huge piece of paper or a small one, or fingerpainting, watercolors, acrylics, pastels, chalk on the sidewalk, whatever color feels good in your hands moving across a surface. Sometimes drawing letters or circles helps get me started. It doesn’t need to be for a long time, or with any purpose other than feeling that movement and noticing color. How do you feel afterwards? Does creating color bring a sense of play?
Kelly Sather is the author of SMALL IN REAL LIFE (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023), her debut story collection and winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, a book that evokes the myth and melancholy of Southern California. A former entertainment lawyer and screenwriter, she holds an MFA from Bennington and her work has appeared in Santa Monica Review, J Journal, Pembroke Magazine, PANK, and elsewhere. She grew up in Los Angeles and lives in Northern California.
You can find her on IG @kl_sather and learn more about her website: kellysather.com. And, you can hear Kelly read one of my favorite stories from her book, “The Spaniard,” here at Debutiful. I also highly recommend following Kelly’s Substack newsletter Small in Real Life, in which she writes about books and culture, as well as desire, belonging, and fame.
Be Where You Are is a newsletter about how to use writing and mindfulness to be where you are. If you have ideas to share for future newsletters, you can reply to this email or email me at emilymohnslate@gmail.com. You can support this newsletter by liking, commenting & sharing it with other people. You can also find me on Instagram or Facebook or find more info at my website. Thank you for reading!