Writing, and Editing, and Pin-making, oh-my! An Interview with Kari Castor
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| Kari Castor |
The fantastic Kari Castor, writer, editor, and enamel pin maker has stopped by and answered some questions for me. This is awesome news for you because she's got a fantastic pin/jewelry site for you to look at, amazing responses to comic book and writing questions, and she name-drops one of my favorite movies (SuckerPunch). Ah, yes.
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| This is one of the best movies to watch, I don't care what critics say. |
For those of you who haven't heard yet, my favorite comic publisher Big Dog Inc is celebrating 10 years this month, and Kari is one of their writers and editors. Thankfully, she's a really cool person too- I met her a while back when I first met BDI's creator Tom Hutchison and since BDI is back with a force, I wanted to showcase her. She's one of the coolest people you may not know about, but we've gotta change that.
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| Tom Hutchison and Kari Castor of Big Dog Inc |
DL: Which authors and artists (from any medium) do you draw inspiration from?
KC: I always have such difficulty answering this question, because I can’t possibly list every writer I admire without going on forever, but if I try to select just a few to talk about, it feels like I’m leaving out so many important ones.
But ok, here we go...
I think my short fiction in particular is heavily influenced by Ray Bradbury -- his knack for making the strange feel commonplace and the commonplace feel magical is unparalleled.
One of my favorite books of all time (and one which I frequently force upon other people) is Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, which is an incredible collection of linked short stories about soldiers in Vietnam. The writing is masterful and I find new things to appreciate every time I go back to it.
I love Kurt Vonnegut’s wit, insight, and absurdity. No one writes about the human condition with quite the loving cynicism of Vonnegut.
I think that sci-fi at its best offers us new ways of looking at our own world by giving us a strange lens through which to view it, so I love writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia E. Butler whose oeuvres are full of not just engaging stories but also new perspectives, the political as told through the personal.
I’ve been reading a fair bit of Elena Ferrante recently, and I think she’s an absolutely stunning writer. It’s so frustrating that “women’s fiction” or fiction about women’s experiences and lives is so often undervalued and treated as unserious. Ferrante’s writing is sharp and her depictions of women’s lives and relationships are touching and brutal and honest.
Lucille Clifton is one of my perennial favorite poets and one of my frequent recommendations for people interested in trying out poetry. Her work is accessible -- she’s not intentionally obtuse or trying to prove how clever she can be -- but not simple -- it’s deeply evocative. She can do so much in just a few words.
Li-Young Li is another poet who is near and dear to my heart. His work can be a bit more esoteric, but I love the way he commingles the deeply personal with the mystical. A college writing professor once instructed us to “listen to the universe” for a poetry assignment, and I always think of that phrase in conjunction with Li -- he’s got at least one ear always tuned in, listening to the universe.
DL: How long does it take you to write a comic issue? A poem? A story?
KC: It varies a lot and it’s often really hard to say exactly how long something took to create. For example, on one day it might take me half an hour to write down the basic gist of a poem, but it may have been germinating in my head for days or months prior to that, and then I might revise it once or five times or twenty times before I call it “finished.” Or I might never finish it at all, but someday I’ll pull it apart and use pieces of it to create a new poem, and so on… Sometimes a piece just comes together really quickly and easily; other times it takes months or years and multiple iterations before I feel finished with a piece.
Writing a comic issue is an interesting challenge compared to something like a free-verse poem or a story, because I have to work within specific constraints. If I’m writing prose fiction, it can be as long or as short as it needs to be to tell the story I want to tell, but if I’m writing a comic book, I have to fit my story to a specific number of pages, so it changes the process for me. I’m not one of those meticulous plotters when it comes to fiction writing – I’m more of a “I’ll just start and see where it goes” writer. But with comics, I really do need to plot out the story first to make sure that it fits the page count and has good pacing.
DL: Big Dog Ink is celebrating ten years this year. What prompted you to work with them?
KC: Honestly, it was mostly dumb luck. Tom happened to live down the street from me and we met because I was taking a photo in my driveway with some friends, all of us cosplaying, on the way to a comic con. I picked up some BDI books to check out, and I liked them, but I noticed some things that bugged me. (I’m a former English teacher, I can’t help noticing grammar things.) After I read them, I basically told Tom, “Your stories are cool, but I think you need an editor.” So that’s how I became BDI’s editor.
At some point I think we talked very casually about whether I’d be interested in writing something, and I was, but I didn’t really have any brilliant ideas about what it would be and I’d never written a comic before, so it all seemed like a fairly remote possibility until suddenly Shahrazad happened, and now here we are.
DL: One of BDI’s best known characters, Shahrazad, is back in the spotlight with a brand-new Kickstarter launch this month. You wrote and edited the original stories in 2013-14. How did the storyline come about?
KC: I cowrote the original story arc with Kim (Hutchison) Maciejewski, and she and Tom and I all had a lot of brainstorming conversations about what this book was going to be and how we were going to wrangle all of these ideas we had into a story that actually worked. (Credit where credit is due, my husband Aaron isn’t credited on the book, but he was also a part of many of those brainstorming sessions and made some valuable contributions to the process as well!) We drew on a lot of different inspirations for it, in terms of both the story and the aesthetic, from Doctor Who to Sucker Punch to the tales collected in the One Thousand and One Nights to Shakespeare… Once we decided we were starting with pirates, we plotted out the rough overall story arc for our five issues, and then went back and filled in the details.
I’m a literature nerd, so one of the things I really love about Shahrazad is that it’s deliberately allusive in both form and narrative. If you read the One Thousand and One Nights, you’ll find that the stories are frequently layered within each other – stories within stories, all within the frame story of clever Shahrazad (or Scheherazade) telling tales to her husband the king in order to save her own life. So we wanted to use that idea of stories within stories in our Shahrazad, and we wanted the book to really be steeped in literature and history, just as Shahrazad’s original nightly tales were, but in new and surprising ways. The original miniseries draws particularly on elements of maritime history and Greek and Roman mythology. The first Sidequest issue, on Kickstarter now, takes inspiration from 12th century French poet Chrétien de Troyes and from feudal Japan.
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| Shahrazad brought to life by Castor! One of many covers available. I really like this one by CB Zane though. Wonder why... |
DL: What comics (if any) did you read growing up? Are there any you read now, and if so what?
KC: I didn’t get into comics until I was in college. I grew up in a very small, conservative town and I always felt like a bit of an outsider, as a girl who was into sci-fi and fantasy and computers (this was before all of that really hit mainstream pop culture). But when I got to college, I found other people who were into the same sorts of things I was, and I started playing Dungeons & Dragons, picking up comic books, etc. Some of the first comics I really got into were CrossGen books, especially Sojourn and later the tragically short-lived El Cazador, so I was really bummed when they folded. Red Sonja was another relatively early discovery for me; I’ve always been a sucker for a badass warrior woman. And then there were things like Hellboy and Sandman which are classics, obviously, and which I still think are great examples of some of the best writing and storytelling comics can achieve.
These days, I’m a graphic novel / TPB reader – collecting single issues just isn’t my thing and I’d rather sit down with a whole story arc at once. I really love Saga; it’s just such a cool book. I think Vol. 1 of Monstress is probably one of my favorite recent acquisitions, and I’m looking forward to reading more; I’ve got Vol. 2 waiting in my to-read pile.
DL: Do you favor one writing medium over another? If so, which one?
KC: I guess lately my focus has primarily been on poetry, because something about the act of shaping and playing with language in the way that poetry demands has been really appealing to me. It’s very different from a short story, or an essay, or comic script -- getting the language right is important in any writing, of course, but in poetry the language is as much the point as the story or the emotion, if not moreso. A reader might still find something to enjoy in a story with middling writing if the plot is enjoyable and the characters are appealing. But poetry really depends on the language itself. So I suppose I like the challenge of that. I feel like I have to bring my absolute best when I’m working in that medium.
That said, I’m never going to give up on other mediums, and what I think it’s inevitable that over time I’ll continue to be drawn to different things depending on what I’m doing or how I’m thinking at any given point.
DL: What are you currently reading?
KC: Speaking of stories within stories within stories, I recently finished Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James, which was… wow. It’s a strange, difficult, sometimes bewildering book, and it feels like something completely new. When I first heard about it, it was being called an “African Game of Thrones” (it’s the first in a planned trilogy), but that description belies how little this book cares about the traditional narrative structure and expectations of Western literature. It’s kaleidoscopic – all fragmented pieces that form a dizzying, fascinating whole. It’s not for everyone. I’m excited to read more.
I’m currently reading N.K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky and Fatimah Asghar’s If They Come for Us. The Stone Sky is the final book in the Broken Earth trilogy, Jemisin’s post-apocalyptic fantasy series. I think she’s easily one of the best speculative fiction writers working today, and I’m looking forward to finishing out this series. If They Come for Us is Asghar’s debut poetry collection which focuses on the author’s family history and personal identity as a Pakistani-American woman. It’s a strong first collection, poignantly weaving together the personal and the political.
DL: Cunning Linguist Co. is your brand that makes enamel pins, stickers, patches, and other small embellishments- what prompted you to venture into this?
KC: Well, I got into collecting enamel pins a few years ago because I just loved getting to pick up such a fun variety of great wearable art. I like jewelry in general, and pins are great because you can mix and match them, add them to bags or hats or sweaters or whatever you feel like, and they just feel really versatile and fun.
Anyway, after collecting them for a while, I started to have some ideas of things that I thought would be good pin designs, and I looked around and didn’t see anyone making them, and I wondered, “Huh, could I make them?” So I did.
Cunning Linguist Co. is a kind of confluence of a lot of things that I enjoy or that matter to me – it’s sarcastic, it’s sex-positive, it’s feminist, it’s colorful… The honest truth is that 90% of the time I’m just making things I want to wear, and it’s always a pleasant surprise when it turns out other people want to wear them too!
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| Pieces of flair too badass for Chotchkie's. |
DL: What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received, or heard?
KC: It’s a terrible cliché, but I do still find a lot of value in “kill your darlings.” Maybe I’d revise it to something like, “be willing to kill your darlings,” though that’s a lot less snappy. But that idea, that you need to be able to axe the things that you thought were so fucking clever when you wrote them, is a good one. It’s not an infallible rule – sometimes you get lucky and your darlings do the work you want them to in the context of the piece – but it’s a good reminder that being able to step back and look critically at every bit of your writing, even the stuff you really love, is an important skill and a necessary part of revision. It doesn’t matter how personally pleased I am by a certain turn of phrase or bit of imagery; if that element isn’t working within (or is distracting from) the piece as a whole, I need to be able to recognize that and cut it.
I think the other best piece of advice is simply that writing is work. If you want to be good at something, you have to work at it. If you want to improve your skills, you have to practice regularly. If you want to be a writer, you have to do the work of actually writing. I think a lot of people like the idea of being a writer, but expect for some reason that it should just be easy -- that if the words aren’t flowing with ease and perfectly formed onto the page, they’re doing something wrong or they should just give up. Most people don’t pick up a pen and expect to be automatically able to draw amazing things, but for some reason many people do expect to be able to write with ease, and that’s just not how it works. Put in the time, practice, write a lot and accept that a lot of what you write won’t be very good, but that’s part of the process. You have to do something to get better at it.
DL: How can our readers stay in touch with you?
KC: They can follow me on Facebook (where they can enjoy a smattering of politics, Star Wars, and miscellaneous pictures cross-posted from Instagram), Twitter (where they’ll be treated to occasional flurries of activity which are mostly just me retweeting things I think are amusing), or Instagram (for photos of camping trips, beer, corgis, and bald men). They can also visit my website at www.karicastor.com.
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