Conversations Between Friends: C. H. Hooks and Kelsey Norris
Kelsey Norris and I spoke in December. She was in Washington, DC and I was in St. Augustine, Florida, two arguably very different spaces to prepare for the holidays. We were also preparing for her to join me at Flagler College as our spring author in residence. We started the Storytellers Author in Residence at Flagler College in the spring of 2024. The residency is based on the tradition of storytelling in Saint Augustine, Florida. Exactly. I mention Florida and many will balk. But we have a rich history of the literary arts in Saint Augustine. Zora Neale Hurston, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Stetson Kennedy all called Saint Augustine home. Samuel L. Clemens, Edna Ferber, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James (among others) all visited the Ponce De Leon Hotel that eventually became Flagler College.
Rita Bullwinkel recommended Kelsey Norris to me as our next potential Storyteller. I couldn’t be happier that she did. Kelsey’s work reflects the maturity brought on by experience and travel (she was born in Alabama and volunteered for the Peace Corps in Namibia). Her storytelling is beautiful with a bite—superb. I was happy to get to talk with her about her work, our literary “homes,” and parenting as a writer.
—C. H. Hooks
C. H. Hooks: Kelsey, I’m so excited that you’re coming down to St. Augustine. I can’t wait to introduce you to the strangeness and wonderfulness of this place—your temporary home. Northeast Florida is often considered a part of the Deep South, even as the rest of the state is considered to be more tropic-leaning. It still feels wild even as development creeps in. The tension is easy to see. But of course, the American South is no stranger to tension and conflict in both our nature and our humanity. When did you last live in what would be considered the Deep South? In that time, are there things that you’ve missed?
Kelsey Norris: Hey, C. H.! Can’t wait to join y’all down there! Hmm, the last time I resided in the South was when I was in Nashville for grad school. I cannot believe it’s been a decade since I started my program at Vanderbilt, but time does fly in such a strange way—slowly, slowly, and then quickly, in my experience. Nashville is probably the most outright talented city I’ve ever lived in. I went to several concerts at the Ryman while I was there, and artists were often so stoked to play in that historic venue that they’d put on great shows. During the sing-along portion of all the concerts, when the artists would sort of hold the mike aloft for the audience to chime in, those audiences in particular were so good at harmonizing. I’ve missed the food and the drawl and the proximity to my family. I’ve missed wide-open spaces. I’m happy to be heading back toward home for a while, though it’s a fraught time to be going south again. When was your last time away from the South for an extended period of time? Did you find yourself setting fiction there, or did the South come into stronger relief for you as a result of being away
CHH: It’s funny, we lived in Philadelphia for a while—a couple of years. While so many have negative things to say about it, we loved it. I think it actually took me moving away from the South to be able to really start writing. When we first moved up there from Savannah I started pulling out all of these notes I’d been jotting down. The job market was really tough at the time, right after the recession, and in between looking for work and interviewing I would write furiously. It all came out in ink. Writing finally clicked for me there, and I swear it took moving out of the South for that to happen. I could finally see it from a distance. I truly loved, still love, Philly. Our daughter was born there. I couldn’t set fiction there because I never felt like it was mine to have, but it sure did help. Your question brings me back to this concept of home, and what we consider it to be. The acknowledgments at the front of House Gone Quiet include a note, “To the people I call home,” and the story “The Sound of Women Waiting” includes the line, “How long does a sense of home take to build? How long until a life feels like your own, rather than something you’ve fallen into?” What does home to you—the writer—feel like? Can we have multiple spaces that feel like home? Do you feel that you’ve found your literary home?
KN: I’m from Alabama and lived most of my life there, but I was actually born closer to where I live now in DC. Neither of my parents are from Alabama, and they came to my hometown by way of the army base nearby, where they both served. All that to say that the concept of home, for me, is very much tied to the people who make it feel like one.
It seems to me that the places where you live—and maybe particularly the places where you live with the people you love—stick on you like a second skin, for whatever length of time after you leave them. It sounds like Philly’s done that for you. For a writer, I think that chance to get a sense of a new place’s culture and its superstitions and idioms and even the weather is such fertile ground for storytelling. That was the starting place for “Salt” in my collection, which is set in Namibia, on the salt pan I lived beside for two years. I wrote that story partially as a means of clinging to the memory of that place I’d come to know so well, but I was really anxious about misrepresenting it. There’s a critic waiting in the wings of my mind who stands up and says, “You’re a fraud! You got that place all wrong!” Though I have to quiet that guy down even when I write stories set in the South. Do you run into that dude, too? How do you shut him up?
CHH: I love your concept of the second skin. I always loved moving, especially as a kid, because of the pieces of the places you could bring along to the next spot. I never minded being the new kid, but perhaps it’s because at that earlier age it feels less like people are dissecting your person. They kind of take you at face value. That happens less as we put work into the public space.
I was tempted to say that Self-Doubt and I are friends because we spend so much time together. But, we’re more roommates—and not very good ones. They don’t clean up after themselves, are always around, et cetera…. I could run with the extended metaphor forever. So, yes. We live together. I think I’ve found that the only way I can escape self-doubt, at least for a time, is to keep working. When I stop working or get too busy with life to move on to the next project, I allow just enough of an opening for the nagging fraud voice. I thought it would go away after another story, then another book, but I’m convinced it never goes away. I feel a heavy amount of guilt when I’m not working. Unfortunately, I think this guilt stems from the concept of maximizing productivity. I work to relax, which is not great. I just reread that response and it’s a pretty sad answer. I’m sorry! I wish I had a more uplifting message for someone I know is currently deep at work on a novel. But maybe it’s important to ask—how does your process for novel writing compare to writing a story collection? Does it feel different? Do short stories still try to come to you while you’re in novel-writing mode? I imagine them knocking on the window, waving. Do you keep them locked out?
KN: No, I get that. Momentum seems key. With the novel project I’m working on, even a day away from it seems to open up some kind of crack in the work where its aboutness—like, its marketing copy or what standing it has amongst all of the world’s big current issues—starts shoving its way in. Which is too much pressure to put on a first draft of anything, let alone a novel draft that’s looking as roughly drawn as mine is right now.
Novel-writing has been such a different beast in terms of endurance and self-belief. I’m usually able to knock out the rough draft of a short story in one to two sittings; I’ve typically got a setting or a speculative premise in mind, and I either know the ending as I’m starting out, or else a major middle component. Even if it changes drastically by the final draft, that first generative draft of a short story is the closest I ever get to feeling like I’m making art. Like I’m tapping into something outside of myself that already exists but might be fleeting if I don’t get it down on paper. It’s fun when it’s working well. One sentence follows another until the story’s finished out. I get to sprint the story out.
That tendency to sprint hasn’t translated as easily to a long project like a novel, but I’m learning as I go. A mentor of mine, Nancy Reisman, just sent a note of encouragement about the novel process, actually. Self-compassion helps, she said. I think part of the way I’m practicing self-compassion is by letting myself cheat with short fiction occasionally. I have written a couple of short stories in the midst of this longer jaunt, partially just to remind myself that I can carry a story through from beginning to end. I hope to get the chance to publish another story collection during my career, and it’ll likely consist of at least a few stories I wrote while I was avoiding my novel. I can’t be the only one, right? (Please tell me I’m not the only one, C. H.) What’s the balance you strike in your writing between short fiction and long projects? Do you find time for both? Or do you prefer the novel form wholesale?
CHH: You’re not alone! Short stories, for me, are like an exercise or a stretch. Sometimes it’s nice to work on them as the gap-fill between longer projects. Other times they come in the middle of writing a novel. I was always given the advice, “Don’t cheat on your date.” The idea being that you can’t leave the project you’re working on to dabble with another. I took it to heart early, but then realized that a lot of good creativity for any project seemed to come from allowing myself to hash out other ideas. Novels take time and I swear my brain needs a break. It needs inspiration. I generally write novels in scenes/vignettes and some of these pieces become another thing entirely. I’m never sad about that. I always like to have the next “thing” to work on when a project is done. I am a little vexed about my treatment of stories that I consider complete. My computer is where short stories go to die. But I continue to write them. I’ve never felt particularly “good” at writing short stories and this affects my enthusiasm to submit them, but then hashing out ideas has never been about publication. I’ve got a backlog of probably thirty or so stories that will more than likely never see the light of day. To me, the publication world can be intimidating and fickle, but necessary. It takes time to submit stories into what can often feel like a void. How do you strike a balance between the creative work and managing the business side of what we do?
KN: Print those stories out! For me, they never feel real and tangible otherwise. Printed pages are proof of work.
I think my initial concept of the writing life, and of writing full-time in particular, was that it would look like me sitting down at a desk and doing just that for eight hours straight. Writing, I mean, my fingers would be zinging across laptop keys in storytelling mode for a whole workday, with maybe a brief break in the middle for lunchtime. I was so used to a nine-to-five, to a day filled with tasks that I could check off, that I really stumbled when I first stepped into writing. I found that I couldn’t really focus on generating new work for more than three hours a day. The mental work of that left me too tanked to push any more sentences out, so there was a large portion of the day where I was just panicked about not writing.
It took me some time, and also a lot of reading interviews with other writers to realize that all that other stuff is also writing. I only really manage generative writing for about three hours on a good day. But reading is writing. Editing and submitting are writing. I’m counting working on this with you now as writing. Caring for my almost-toddler is generally too all-consuming to feel like writing, but going on a walk with him counts. He’s noticing Christmas lights for the first time, and experiencing his joy and wonder at them secondhand has felt like something close to writing, lately. Or at least, it goes to that mind-bank that might feed the writing later. You talked with American Short Fiction about how parenthood forced a new productivity out of your writing. Is that still the case, two kiddos in? Has teaching added to that? Does either practice feed your work?
CHH: As I’m typing this, Mr. Fox (my son’s well-loved stuffed fox) is sitting next to me. You make a great point—there’s almost no distinguishing the different facets of life as writing doesn’t allow separation. What we do is so portable and constant that it never stops happening—at least in the form of ideation. I get frustrated sometimes because I’ll try to maintain a thought or an idea just long enough to be able to write it down, but then one of my kids will ask me a question. Sometimes, the thoughts—if they’re good enough—survive! Writing things down has become so important in that way. I went into my MFA six weeks after my son was born. It feels wild to say that now. I feel fortunate that I was able to learn to write around both kids and work and life in general. The writing had to happen by fitting into my world. It still does.
I understand that teaching can be seen as an obstacle for some writers. It can force a compartmentalization and it becomes, “I just need to make it until summer break.” I think the focus becomes others’ work, and in some ways it needs to be. But I’m thankful that I’ve found ways to break down delineations of my work getting done versus theirs. This semester I taught a novel-writing class and I structured it in a way that allowed me to work on a draft of my novel while students were drafting theirs. I was a draft or so ahead, but the process was so fresh that it felt truly relevant to both their process and mine. It has really helped me with revision. But that word revision makes me wonder—do you find that writing, if it exists in your life all the time, forces you to be a perpetual observer as a parent? Do you process life as a revision, after the experience?
KN: I cannot imagine starting an MFA with a newborn at home—my brain was absolute mush! But generally, parenthood has made me interact with time in such a new way. There’s nothing else that’s put me so evidently in all the delineations of time—past, present, future—at once. At any given moment, I’m thinking back to when my son last fell asleep and for how long, and also further back to the times when he was brand new and so tiny. We’re approaching toddlerhood now, so when he’s awake, I have to be present enough to keep him alive; he’s putting everything in his mouth, diving off of tall surfaces, eyeing the stairs. He’s wide open. And I’m also aware of how fleeting this time is, how much he’s going to learn and grow and change. I’ve never experienced anything like it before, this blend of watching the clock for bedtime and also operating within a constant state of nostalgia. I feel really grateful for it and for him.
I can be really resistant to revision within my writing process, and maybe I’m a similar way with day-to-day life as well. It can feel like, good or bad, there’s some specific chemistry to the way that events piled up to bring you where you are, and that sliding one brick out of place could send the whole structure toppling. Actually, that’s exactly how I feel about revisions, especially with long projects. Any tips as I’m looking ahead to a later revision process?
Basically, I’m trying to join your novel-writing class. Do you start over from the beginning when you’re on a new draft? Or revise in certain places first? Not sure what your feelings are on talking about in-progress work, but anything you want to share about the novel you’re working on?
CHH: If you’re joining my novel class, I would like to be added to your short story class! You mentioned your story “Salt” earlier, and I believe the process of building a novel is an extrapolation of exactly what you did with that story. If each line of a short story has to be precise in what you aim to accomplish toward an end effect, then each line, then page, then chapter has to work toward an end in the novel. This new novel is different for me. It’s still Southern, but perhaps more universal. It’s also horror. It’s loosely based on my childhood experiences in a small-town mortuary (my grandparents were morticians). Horror requires even more of a build. What I’m learning is that revision is stamina. It’s reading your manuscript again, even when your eyes and brain are tempted toward boredom because you’ve already read those lines countless times. I feel like I have to trick myself to be okay with reading the same text again and pretend that I haven’t read it before. I don’t start over. I know that some do. I value what I wrote the first time because I feel like there is something magical about what our brain spits out when first diving into a visualization of a new story. It’s first-run creativity. There were a couple of exercises I did with this novel that really exposed cracks. Visually creating individual character arcs was one of them. It blew my mind to be able to see holes in my build of secondary characters so glaringly. I did the exercise with my students and immediately wrote down another nine scenes that I found I needed. It made the revision process feel so rich. The other thing that I’ve found is so incredibly important, book-by-book—and this sounds obvious as I write it—is to have a first reader. Do you have that person? Will it be the same person as you get to that point with your novel work?
KN: I’m hooked on your next book already. And that exercise sounds so fruitful—a manageable bite to take out of a big project that ends up being really generative for it as a whole.
I’m not sure that it’s the best route, but my current rule for a first reader is that they have to love me. Ha! I’m typically really protective of a new project before I’m at least to the end of the first draft of it because it’s so easy to talk yourself in or out of a concept before it’s finished, or to warp it based on someone else’s ideas of what it could be. But that’s proven less practical with a novel project than it is with short fiction, mostly because my own tendency toward perfectionism means my courage flags mid-draft. Right now, my first reader is my husband, who ignores characters’ names changing and glaring plot holes in order to offer unbridled enthusiasm and a sounding board. I’ve also been lucky enough on my publishing journey to find an agent and editor who are endlessly encouraging and also story- and industry-savvy enough to know when I need a stronger push. It’s so tempting to keep your head down and write in total isolation. That’s great while the work is working, but maybe spells a certain kind of disaster when it isn’t. Part of what I’m excited for about this residency is to be in creative community again—with you, with students who might want to write fiction, with a place that’s proven creatively fertile to the writers you mentioned earlier. I’m ready to try on a new place. Thanks to you, and to Rita, and to Flagler and Saint Augustine for the opportunity.
CHH: I can’t wait to read your next work—and we’re so happy to have you down here! I know the students are going to grow so much in their writing from working with you. I know that I will too!
KELSEY NORRIS is a writer and editor from Alabama. She earned an MFA from Vanderbilt University and has worked as a teacher in Namibia, as a school librarian, and as a bookseller. Her work has been published in The Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, and The Rumpus, among others. She is currently based in Washington, DC. Her debut story collection, House Gone Quiet (Scribner, 2023), was a finalist for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Find Kelsey on Instagram @chuc_kn_orris.
C. H. HOOKS is the author of Can’t Shake the Dust (Regal House Publishing, 2024) and Alligator Zoo-Park Magic (2019). His work has appeared in print and online publications including The Los Angeles Review, American Short Fiction, Four Way Review, Tampa Review, The Bitter Southerner, and Burrow Press. He has been a Tennessee Williams Scholar and contributor at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and attended the DISQUIET International Literary Program. He teaches at Flagler College, and lives and sails in St. Augustine. Find C. H. on Instagram @chhooks.
