Portland Fiction Project Interview: Kate Nordbye

This interview was conducted via email by contributor Spencer Cushing.  You can see what Spencer is up to over on Twitter.

Welcome back to another mini-interview with the up and coming writers from the Portland Fiction Project. This time we sit down with a weaver of magical-realism and a surrealist engineer. Kate Nordbye has been with PFP for some time and you can find a host of her stories on the PFP website. Her body of work creates magical moments when metaphors become real and still represent what they were created for. So peer into her brain here then check out the fun piece she wrote for Reading Local. Until next time, RL readers!

What inspired your piece for Reading Local?

Life did, Spencer, life did.

Sorry, that was lame. No, I was having a(nother) identity (crisis) – several months back and was going through an all too familiar process where my writing starts to feel forced and stagnant and I start to wonder what I’m doing and where I’m taking all this. And those thoughts lead to wondering about what it means to be a writer and at what point you get to call yourself one. What makes you legitimate. So the piece stems from those thoughts. The cop story at the end is true. Mostly – I didn’t confuse “police” for “publishers.” That would have been ridiculous.

You use a lot of surreal almost magical realism elements in your stories, have you always written in that style, or is it something you have discovered over time?

Yes and no, I suppose. It’s certainly evolved as more of my voice or style since I’ve joined the Portland Fiction Project, but I would say it’s always been a tendency of mine – just even in how my brain works. I like magic. I like things that are indirect. I like metaphors that actualize, because I think they often get at emotions in a more honest way; or at least in a more unobtrusive way. And honestly, I just have fun thinking about life in those terms.

What’s the most important element for you in telling a story? Also, what do you want a reader to take away from your stories?

I hesitate with this question, because I think it changes, and I also think I’m not always that intentional with having something to take away. I often just write to an emotion I’m feeling and I try to be honest to that emotion and hope that it conveys itself to the reader. That said, it’s also important to me that stories are well-written. I know that can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people – but I love the craft of writing and love when I see it done well. I think it’s an art and I think it can be magical – to read something well written; be it playful, prophetic, poetic or crude.

Which authors do you think have inspired your style of writing?

I’m a sucker for the classics. My sister jokes that I don’t read many authors who aren’t dead, which isn’t entirely true, but she isn’t wrong either. I love the Russian authors: Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy – for their patience with a scene and their insight into character. Oscar Wilde, Kafka, Rushdie, and especially Gabrielle Garcia Marquez were particularly influential. Salinger. Zora Neal Hurston, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Langston Hughes, Thomas Wolfe. I love love Aimee Bender – she’s not dead. I really like a lot of Miranda July’s stories as well. This list could go on forever, by the way.

Do you have a process for writing? Organic? Disciplined? How do you get from rough draft to polished story?

I would love to say that I’m more disciplined than I am. My goal is to eventually become a faithful, loyal, obedient writer who sits down everyday and writes at the same time, on the same schedule and be really awesome and consistent, but I’m just not. Most of my story ideas happen, without fail, just before I fall asleep. Which also means that most of my story ideas are illegible in the morning.

I rarely have a plot in mind when I write a story. Overwhelmingly, my stories start with an obsessive desire to write about a particular emotion or with an observation of something simple around me. Like the color of a room or someone’s hand. I’ll notice a hand, and something will strike me about it and a sentence will form around it. I’ll play with that single sentence for a while, and when I sit down to write, I will shape it into a story.

Which Portland Author(s) would you recommend to other readers?

The Portland Fiction Project. Is it cheating if I say that?

Check out Kate’s first essay for Reading Local here, and more of her writing for PFP here.