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Interview with Katherine Duke
January 12, 2015
Katherine Duke is an award-winning writer and editor. She recently created the collaborative nonfiction book, Kissability: People with Disabilities Talk About Sex, Love, and Relationships, which is available from Levellers Press. For more information, visit her Twitter feed, LinkedIn profile, or freelancing page.
Tibbetts: How long have you been writing?
Duke: I've been writing creatively since early elementary school--ever since I learned how to use a pencil and type on a keyboard, really. I decided I wanted to become a professional writer at age six or seven. (Specifically, I aspired to write a best-selling novel by the time I graduated from high school. I'm not kidding when I say that it's taken me many years to accept that this was an absurdly ambitious goal and to forgive myself for not reaching it.)
Tibbetts: What made you decide to become a writer?
Duke: I've always been a word-nerd: adept with words and fascinated by words. I started talking at seven months old, and as soon as I heard a new word or phrase ("nutritious," "impeccable," "son of a bitch"), I would incorporate it into my vocabulary, regardless of whether I understood what it meant.
And I was lucky to grow up in a household with lots of books and stories. My parents read a lot, to themselves and to my sister and brothers and me. So, of course, we learned to read to ourselves and to each other, and at some point I started making up stories to tell my siblings at bedtime. Mom and Dad bought me notebooks and pens and typewriters so I could write my stories down. Early on, these were typically about kids waking up and going to school and hanging out with their friends--probably painfully boring to read, but I had great fun writing and illustrating them. Gradually I learned how to write stories with actual plots and conflicts and themes, and I started keeping private journals and using my writing to process my own experiences and emotions. I got a computer, too.
My schoolteachers always praised my writing as well, and entered me in essay and poetry contests. I was a total teacher's pet, so their encouragement was powerful.
All of these factors converged to help me figure out that writing was something fun and healthy that I could do well enough to impress people, so I should definitely try to do it for the rest of my life; writer should be my job and my identity. I've flirted with other career ambitions along the way--cartoonist, comedian, actor, English teacher--but nearly all of them have related in some way to words and storytelling.
Tibbetts: What do you consider your best work(s) so far?
Duke: One of my most startlingly successful works was a dramatic monologue for an acting class in high school. It was called "Jellybeans," and it was from the point of view of a teenage girl, talking to her brother after his death. My acting teacher entered it in a contest sponsored by the New York State Theatre Education Association, and it was performed onstage and won the grand prize at the association's annual conference. Our local newspaper ran the entire monologue and interviewed me about it. Later, a literary journal called Mindprints published it, and the journal's editors nominated it for a Pushcart Prize. This actually wasn't a big deal; the editors also nominated several other pieces from their journal. But it's possibly the most impressive-sounding thing I'll ever be able to say about myself: "I was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for something I wrote in a single afternoon when I was seventeen."
Since 2006, I've been a writer and editor for the magazine and website of my alma mater, Amherst College. Of everything I've written for this job, I'm proudest of a 2009 magazine feature called "'Our Fellows Deserve to Be Heard.'" It's about an Amherst alumnus whose brother died under mysterious circumstances in a horrendously inhumane German prison camp during World War II, and how, more than sixty years later, this alumnus finally made contact with another POW who had been with his brother and could tell him exactly what happened. It was a great honor for me to help tell that story and to speak with some of the veterans and family members involved.
Then there's Kissability: People with Disabilities Talk About Sex, Love, and Relationships, published last year by Levellers Press. (It's also available in print and e-book format through Amazon.) My interest in disability issues is personal--I have cerebral palsy and use a wheelchair --but the book is based primarily on the experiences and opinions of forty disabled individuals from five different countries. These people responded to a questionnaire I posted online about body image, sex, dating, family, friendship, and other related topics, and I wove their responses into sixteen chapters. I've done interviews about the book, as well as readings and Q&A's, and the responses have generally been amazingly positive and supportive. I'm well past high school, and it would be a stretch to call this any kind of a best-seller, but it feels really good to have met my goal of having a book published.
Tibbetts: What is your ideal working environment?
Duke: I work best in silence and solitude. Noises, especially spoken words, interfere with the words I'm trying to organize in my head. And when I get deeply absorbed in planning out part of a story, I often stare into space, talk to myself, and gesture weirdly--all of which I'd be embarrassed for other people to see. (As a kid, I very rarely even allowed other people to watch me play with my dolls; it made me self-conscious to have them scrutinize my creative process.)
Tibbetts: Do you ever throw away material?
Duke: Oh, I throw away tons of material. That's one of the most important skills I've learned in my work as an editor, and in my work with an editor at my day job. Whenever I interview someone for the purposes of writing a magazine or Web article, I end up saying, "I could probably write thousands of words about you, but I have to keep the article very brief and focused on one specific aspect of your story." Then I'll write a 650-word draft, and my editor will cut it down to 550.
Kissability is under ninety pages long. I left hundreds of pages of questionnaire responses on the proverbial cutting-room floor. Some of these responses are fascinating and poetic, but I just couldn't find places for them in the book. I haven't completely "thrown away" any responses--the files are still saved on my computer--and maybe someday I'll make some other use of the best responses I left out. They're like "deleted scenes" on a DVD.
Tibbetts: What are you currently working on?
Duke: Ironically, I haven't really written any fiction since earning my master's degree in fiction in 2006. The articles I write for my day job are nonfiction, as is the Kissability book. Now that the book is published, I feel freed-up and eager to sharpen my fiction skills again, so I've started drafting a short story that's been marinating in my mind for months and months. It's tentatively titled "The Text and the Drive," and it's inspired in part by the freelance copyediting work I do. Without giving too much away, I'll say that it's about a young man whose friend hires him to copyedit a novel, and as he does so, he learns some things that alter his understanding of the friendship. This story might or might not turn into anything publishable, and if not, that's okay; at least it's good practice.
Tibbetts: What projects would you most like to tackle?
Duke: Eventually, I'd like to produce an audiobook and/or a stage production of Kissability, not only because the book, with its dozens of different voices, lends itself to those formats, but because presenting any creative work in multiple formats can make it more accessible to those with disabilities (and to a wider audience in general).
In recent years, I've become a podcast junkie: I listen to nearly a dozen different podcasts about storytelling, science, comedy, trivia, word games, television, and movies. And I've deeply enjoyed what little experience I've had with editing audio content. So I sometimes think I'd like to create my own podcast. But with whom, and about what, and how it would intersect with my writing career, I have no clear idea yet.
I also sometimes fantasize about starting a blog on pop culture. A friend once praised my "pop-culture microanalysis"--my tendency to fixate on one tiny element of the world of comedy, literature, TV, or cinema and analyze the living daylights out of it. So, obviously, Pop-Culture Microanalysis will have to be the name and theme of my blog, if and when I ever launch it.
Tibbetts: What are some of the things you've learned from your experiences with this medium?
Duke: Here's a lesson I've learned several times, in fiction and nonfiction: Sometimes you have to draft an entire story before you figure out what story you should be telling. When you first set out to write it, you might think, "It's going to focus on this person, who faces this conflict, and this will be the theme," but by the time you reach the end, your main character has displayed traits that you didn't expect, and you've discovered an even more compelling conflict and a deeper theme. Then you have to go back to the beginning and revise with these new focuses in mind.
On a related note: Sometimes the sheer length of time you spend on a project will change the project. I spent more than six years working on Kissability, and at times I was impatient with it. But throughout those years, I was gaining knowledge and life experience, in light of which I kept revising and refining the text. Not until the eighth or ninth draft did I realize that things changing over time needed to be one of the themes of the book. The end result was, I think, a more substantive book than it would have been if I'd cranked it out in a single year.
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