Kristen Millares Young calls her novel Subduction “a study of recurrently going meta,” or “an examination of the longing that we have to be in contact with others who are not like us.” From exploring the notion of consent–not just sexually but also culturally–to the difficulty of the transmission of knowledge and the burden of whiteness, this novel plumbs the depths of the human consciousness. Kristen is a prize-winning journalist and essayist who regularly writes essays, book reviews, and investigations for The Washington Post, The Guardian, Literary Hub, and much more. Her recent novel Subduction, published by Red Hen Press, was named a staff pick by The Paris Review, called “whip-smart” by The Washington Post, was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and won the Nautilus and Independent Publisher Book awards. We had the privilege of speaking with Kristen about Subduction, including her writing process, how her journalism informs her work as a fiction writer, and her appreciation for Red Hen Press. We also learned about the importance of cultivating a strong professional relationship with an editor and how building trust with them can allow a writer to push for what they believe in.

Published Date: November 30, 2023

Transcription

Phuc Luu:

This has been a live recording of the F***ing Shakespeare Podcast by Bloomsday Literary at the 2023 AWP Conference & Bookfair. We're thankful to be the official podcast for AWP for a third year, and have invited a gallery of guests that you don't want to miss out on. As always, please subscribe, rate, and review so we can continue to bring you interviews of amazing writers sharing about their amazing work. Enjoy.

Interviewer:

Kristen Millares Young is with us today, and she's so ready to go because she already did a podcast interview on The Blazer, a segment that-

Phuc Luu:

Oh, with Pena.

Interviewer:

Pena. Host. Ghost host? I coined a phrase, he's ghost hosting.

Phuc Luu:

Ghost host.

Interviewer:

But you're here to talk about your amazing novel, Subduction, and the journalistic work that you do for the people of this country and all of the cool things. So I'm excited to talk to you. I'm so glad that you agreed to come on this crazy show of ours today.

Kristen Millares Young:

Thank you for having me.

Interviewer:

Yeah, let's get to it. I want to talk about Subduction. Can you first just tell me how that novel came to find its way at Red Hen Press, and I say that as though it was like the novel just walked up to the door and said, "Hello, publish me!" But I'm sure there's more to it. Can you talk about that?

Kristen Millares Young:

Well, Red Hen Press had published Elissa Washuta's My Body Is a Book of Rules, and I went to my UDub MFA with Elissa and met her on a bench outside of Padelford and started talking to her, and really, she's such an ethical and kind and rigorous and thoughtful writer. I teach her work. I teach My Body Is a Book of Rules. I also teach White Magic, which came out on Tin House, but I followed her to Red Hen Press because I saw that they were willing to back work that was bold. I like their very intersectional slate of authors that they're publishing every year, and I like that they are in nonfiction, they're in poetry, they're in fiction, and as a result, they read with that eye. And so that was appealing to me.

Interviewer:

That's amazing. And then Elissa Washuta also interviewed you about Subduction when it came out for Literary Hub?

Kristen Millares Young:

For the Rumpus.

Interviewer:

For the Rumpus, of course.

Kristen Millares Young:

She was one of my first readers.

Interviewer:

Amazing. In that interview, I was struck by something that she wrote:

"As a reporter, taught to write about complex subjects in the third person I was made to project an omniscience I didn't believe in. For that reason, Subduction is an extended inquiry into the dangers of disembodied knowledge, the currency of mainstream media reports and too much academic production. I'm glad that more contemporary thinkers invoke their own personality."

Those were your words.

Kristen Millares Young:

Yes. Thank you. I love being quoted to myself.

Interviewer:

All right.

Kristen Millares Young:

Yes, I said that and I firmly believe it still.

Interviewer:

But I'd love to hear about how that informs your work as a fiction writer. Can you tell me a little bit more about that context?

Kristen Millares Young:

Well, I think that Subduction is a study in always kind of recurrently going meta, right? The entire book is an examination of, and an indictment in some ways, of this longing that we have to be in contact with others who are not like us, and whether that be across gender lines, sexual, or whether it be cultural.

The book features a Latina anthropologist who travels out to the Makah nation, dragging all this damage with her. Her husband just left her for her sister, and she's a stranger and an other to herself. She has alienated herself from her own desires for so long that it rendered her very brittle.

Through the process of writing the book, I used a series of transcripts. I showed her one of the actually most painful scenes for me to write was where she's butchering this transcript that she made, and she's editing out phrases that betray her intentions. And it felt so wrong for me, even when I was writing it, for her to be doing this. And it was horrifying, right?

The book also explores notions of when is it possible to provide consent, not just sexually, but culturally, and we find the characters in positions of compromised consent. And part of that examination is that the power dynamic between them. Peter is a Makah man who has come back to the Makah nation and to take care of his mom, Maggie, who has dementia and become a hoarder, and he enlists Claudia to help him go through this hoard. And Claudia had been working with his mother for several years in his absences. She knows a lot about him. She knows more sometimes about his family history than he knows, because his mother has been protecting him from this information for a long time, about the disappearance of his father.

And so these people, one of the things I really wanted to examine is the difficulty of the transmission of knowledge. And the whole book, you could say, it's built around the architecture remains unsaid between them. So one of them will have information that the other one just doesn't have, and you'll see that. But the reader, of course, is the container for all of the information that is known. But you see the pain and the longing.

Most of us live in basically permanent states of non-disclosure. And so examining that in fiction, what do we not disclose about who we are, what we want, how we mean to get it, and what we hope for. We carry this around like it's a secret, and you see that secret hurting us from inside. And you can do that with fiction in a way that you can't really do it in nonfiction, even though as a journalist and a book critic, as a book critic, I use that first person regularly. But as a journalist, I was taught to be in the third person. And that was so that I could have the institutional authority that was conveyed-

Interviewer:

That disembodied knowledge.

Kristen Millares Young:

... that disembodied knowledge. And there is a role for that, but what that did also was erase the greatest wisdom that I've ever had, which is the embodied wisdom of being a woman, and also my ethnic history, and that intergenerational diasporic knowledge, all of that was also taken away in order to convey that authority of the third person. So it's a question of what do you give up?

Interviewer:

As the daughter of Cuban parents, right?

Kristen Millares Young:

Yes.

Interviewer:

Yes.

Kristen Millares Young:

And so what do you give up in order to gain that authority? And how do we then become strange to ourselves in order to gain power in this world? So it's really, in some ways, not only the novel is very much about the burden of whiteness and the cultural assimilation as that burden of whiteness, as Claudia basically passes in order to be given more access within her academic environment and not to be tokenized. And she also does it though, because she doesn't want to carry the prejudices that people have against her people. So she gives up so much in order to gain that access. And that, of course, there's an intergenerational story about assimilation that's happening in this country every day, has happened within my own family, and it's happening in this fiction.

Interviewer:

Back to the journalist side of things, have you run up against any pushback from some of the institutions where you're submitting work or your work for the New York Times, or even with the book reviews, when you're using the first person and you're trying to subvert some of that concept of disembodied knowledge. What's the reaction of the institutions for which you're publishing?

Kristen Millares Young:

I'm a most regularly contributor to the Washington Post, and I have such an amazing editor there. Her name is Stephanie Merry, and she loves it. She loves it. She's all about it. And one of the things that I really enjoy about her is that now, I mean, she gave me an Isabel Allende book to review, and I didn't like panning it, but it was badly written, and I don't like doing that. I will if I have to. I'm here to serve the reader and not to serve the author, frankly. But I found a way to kind of open it up. I was like, my mother, which is true. My Cuban mother was like, she texted me and she's like, "Sweetheart, can you get out of doing the Allende review?" And it was a little sparkly heart, and my editor let me put that as the very first line. Like my whole family's worried about what I'm about to do here.

I really appreciated that, that she even let me. I've done a reviews in the second person, actually, of a book called Bloomland by John Engelhardt. But one of the things that I really like about the Washington Post, and this isn't true of the New York Times, to the Washington Post, I can pitch books to review, and as a result, I'm able to bring in a very intersectional canon. So I've been really honored to review books by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Carmen Maria Machado, Louis Elliot, like Maggie Nelson, Melissa Febos. I mean, this book I reviewed is just bangers, right? And most recently, I think, Ross Gay. And when I do that, I read everything that person's ever written, and it makes me better, and it makes the review better. And so she knows that I do that preparation. She knows. And so she basically lets me get away with whatever I want to do.

Interviewer:

What do you do in terms of serving other freelancers out there? How did you find that in Steph.... Is her name Stephanie?

Kristen Millares Young:

Stephanie, yeah.

Kristen Millares Young:

Stephanie?

Interviewer:

How did you find that relationship where someone is not only allowing it, but encouraging it and cultivating that sort of stance?

Kristen Millares Young:

Well, one thing I will say is I feel like, especially in the literary world, people are trying to build their bios rather than thinking about building relationships. And so if you find an editor, a literary review, that is publishing your work, that likes it, submit to them again, right? But people are trying to submit to other reviews so that they can have that line item. I'm like, "Y'all, don't you know that the more you work with this person, the more they're going to understand your style, and then you can keep pushing and pushing and pushing things-

Interviewer:

The more fruitful...

Kristen Millares Young:

Yes. So I have been reviewing almost exclusively for the Washington Post since 2018 for that reason, because I know that I can be innovative with the reviews.

Interviewer:

Life lessons.

Phuc Luu:

Yeah, again, very practical.

Kristen Millares Young:

Practical.

Phuc Luu:

For people.

Kristen Millares Young:

For the people.

Interviewer:

Amazing work. Just because we have amazing guests.

Phuc Luu:

Yeah, of course.

Kristen Millares Young:

I want to say thank you so much for your comments during my conversation with Viet Nguyen. That was a real honor for me. And when you invited me to come on this podcast, I was like, wait a minute. I know that guy.

Phuc Luu:

I'm glad you remembered. I was honored you remembered. And that was virtual two years ago, right?

Kristen Millares Young:

Yep.

Phuc Luu:

It's amazing.

Kristen Millares Young:

He's such a good interview.

Phuc Luu:

Yes, he is. I had the chance to speak to him virtually just maybe right after that interview for a congregation in South Carolina, a UCC congregation, that they have a series on ethics and theology.

Kristen Millares Young:

Oh, wow.

Phuc Luu:

And so I'm a theologian by trade, and so he was on and I was on, and then we had a poet on also, and so we were in conversation together.

Kristen Millares Young:

Fantastic. I'm so interested by theology. There is this ache where God used to be, but I've always enjoyed the rigor of theologians and that thinking about divinity and thinking about the larger moral questions that are begged by the question or absence of God.

Phuc Luu:

Yeah, yeah. Well, and I'm impressed by writers too. And so that's why I'm here. Awesome. Very good.

Interviewer:

If there was an emoji to characterize the conversation that's happening now, it would be the sparkly hearts.

Phuc Luu:

Yes. The first thing I thought of was sparkles.

Kristen Millares Young:

Sparkles?

Phuc Luu:

Yeah-

Interviewer:

You were in-

Phuc Luu:

... sparkles everywhere.

Interviewer:

Kristen, it's so lovely to meet you, and it's such an honor to get to dive into your work.

Kristen Millares Young:

Thank you so much.

Interviewer:

I want to ask you lastly, before we leave, if there's anything, what's the most AWP thing that you've heard at the conference? Even though the conference just started, you must have heard some AWP things.

Kristen Millares Young:

Well, actually, it's something that I said and someone overheard and responded to. So I was in the elevator talking to one of my fellow panelists, Michelle Bowdler, the author of Is Rape a Crime? A Memoir, an Investigation and a Manifesto. It's an excellent book.

So I'm telling her, "I'm reading an essay tonight that is going to be at this reading called Nonfiction for No Reason up at the Woods on the third floor. And I wrote this essay about how my grad school mentor tried to steal and rape my work." And I just said that to Michelle. I was like, "My mentor tried to rape my work," and this woman in the elevator turned back and look at me.

And she said, "The same thing happened to me."

And I looked at her and I said, "Well, I did get him stripped of his endowed chairship."

And she said, "Me too."

Interviewer:

Oh, my word.

Kristen Millares Young:

And I was like, yes, yes. Okay. Yes.

Interviewer:

That is community.

Kristen Millares Young:

That is community. And I was grateful that I had said it in this public environment because we then connected.

Interviewer:

And saw each other.

Kristen Millares Young:

Yeah, we need to see each other.

Phuc Luu:

Exactly.

Interviewer:

I love it.

Phuc Luu:

It's so good.

Interviewer:

Thank you so much.

Kristen Millares Young:

Thank you. That essay's out in Volume 1, Brooklyn, for anyone who's interested.

Phuc Luu:

Yeah.

Interviewer:

Yeah.

Kristen Millares Young:

It's called "How to Break Even."

Interviewer:

Nice.

All right. We are going to have to compose a reading list from the AWP interviews, because V.V. "Sugi" Ganeshananthan was just on, and she recommended five or six craft books that I have to go out and buy.

Kristen Millares Young:

Oh, wow. Nice.

Interviewer:

And then I've got to read that essay and the essay that you referenced that spawned your Break Even essay, which was by who? Say that one again?

Kristen Millares Young:

I had written, an essay, a braided essay, for my critical thesis, and it was that that he tried to steal for his own memoir.

Interviewer:

Special place.

Kristen Millares Young:

No, the answer is no.

Interviewer:

At the University of Hell.

Kristen Millares Young:

The answer to that request is no.

Phuc Luu:

A line gets drawn here.

Thank you.

Interviewer:

Well, we will compose that list, and we'll link to all of the things. Thank you so much, Kristen.

Kristen Millares Young:

Thank you.

Phuc Luu:

F***ing Shakespeare is a production of Bloomsday Literary, hosted by Kate Martin Williams, Jessica Cole, and produced by me, Phuc Luu. Our trusty and hardworking intern is Elena Welsh, with special thanks to Juanita Lester and the AWP staff, without whom this would not be possible.