I first encountered Kelsey Norris’s work a few years ago, when I was a fiction editor here at The Rumpus. In a queue of hundreds of story submissions, finding “Decency Rule” and “White Baby” felt like a gift. Norris’s blend of meticulously choreographed prose, propulsive voice, and wry humor made my heart jump. Since that initial encounter and our subsequent editorial collaboration for those stories, I’ve been her peer at the 2020 Tin House Summer Workshop, her editor again when I published her story “Go Way Back” in Midnight Breakfast, and finally, as co-editors when she joined Rumpus staff as a fiction editor in 2021. Now writing full-time, Norris has previously worked as a teacher in Namibia, a school librarian, and a bookseller.
Despite my deep familiarity with her writing, nothing prepared me for what it was like to read Norris’s remarkable debut, House Gone Quiet (Scribner, 2023), recently long-listed for the 2024 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. A short story collection filled with ten wholly original narratives, House Gone Quiet deftly vacillates between the harrowing and the humorous, the intimate and the grand, the personal and the political, the familiar and the strange. It also contains a fair amount of playfulness, especially when it comes to craft. Footnotes in the story “Such Great Height and Consequence” are used for humorous effect, as are New Age–style interludes in “Choose Bliss.” The structure of “Certain Truths and Miracles” moves the reader back and forth in time while braiding the primary narrative with fascinating science about plankton. “Air Shifts,” a story primarily of dialogue, shifts us back and forth between a toxically masculine morning radio talk show and a late-night call-in advice show hosted by a woman. Norris’s stories offer powerful collectives, communities bound by fierce resistance, and relationships threatened by the scope of history. The evocation of discovery and wonder in Norris’s fiction is singular and difficult to match.
I recently spoke with Norris via video chat about her short story collection linked by communities and a sense of belonging, why she is drawn to strange premises in fiction, how she navigates the editing process after being an editor herself, and how finding human elements in such a strange world gives her freedom to create.
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The Rumpus: The genesis of short story collections always fascinates me. Where did House Gone Quiet start for you?
Kelsey Norris: The earliest stories came from my time in my MFA program at Vanderbilt, which would have been 2014 or 2015. And at that time, I thought I was writing a setting or place-based collection because from my understanding, that’s what short story collections were made of—close ties by place or close ties by people or community—but in trying to wrangle the stories together, I ran into difficulty with that. Sometimes I was writing about the [American] South, sometimes I was writing about places that were not the South. I thought it had to be one or the other.
When I went to Tin House [in 2020], I was trying to pitch the book to the industry people at the conference as a place-based collection. I talked myself in and out of that idea. I think at that point, I started understanding I was writing more generally about communities and about belonging and what it means to call a place home. Thinking of the collection as thematically linked, which I had seen other collections do before, allowed me to link the stories together and then also write into the gaps. “Well, okay, there’s a lot of storytelling happening, so why don’t I write one that’s a little lighter, a little funnier?” My characters don’t always talk that much, so I asked myself, “Am I avoiding dialogue?” So then I wrote a story that was entirely dialogue to push myself. That’s where [the story] “Air Shifts” came from.
Rumpus: With the stories in House Gone Quiet, and with your creative process in general, what tends to give a story momentum? What makes you feel compelled to stick with it?
Norris: Most of these stories started with one line: either a beginning or an ending line. With that came a kind of rhythm—a sort of language rhythm—and that was very helpful. It’s hard to think of plot points ahead. I’ll have a vague sense of plot, but generally I don’t know so much of what’s going to happen as much as what sentence will follow the one I just wrote. When a story’s really flowing for me, I can hear the bop-ba-dop-ba-dop of the line, so I know what’s going to follow it. A story that’s cooperating makes itself a sentence at a time. That’s not always the case, but ideally, that’s what happens. The lines that came, either as the first or the last, don’t always end up being the ones that stick with it. “Sentries” is one of the earlier stories in this collection, and it ended completely differently in its initial version. The ending, in the first draft of that story, was the first thing I wrote. It ends now in a place that makes much more sense. The genesis for that story is completely gone at this point, because it was headed in the wrong direction, but it did have the right rhythm.
Other stories in the collection came from an idea or an image. For “Certain Truths and Miracles,” I was on an island and saw the luminescent plankton in the water. I just thought, “How strange would it be if you saw this?” In reality, I’m making a fictionalized version of how people would react to something, which might be very different from how people would actually react. It’s very possible that people would instead be like, “Yep, that’s the ocean. The ocean’s weird.” That was a good genesis for me for starting that story, thinking about the relationship between magic and science, and tradition and superstition, and what makes something true.
Some of the stories have an easier tie-in to modern-day events. “Such Great Height and Consequence” came from statues and Confederate monuments being removed. I’m very glad that it happened, but I have no idea if it will continue to happen. The way that the news cycle works, we take care of a problem all at once and then we just don’t speak about it again. I learned, recently that the statue I was thinking of while writing the description of the general in that story— Nathan Bedford Forrest’s statue in Nashville—came down in late 2021. That statue was on private land, but it was off a big highway, so you would see it coming in and out of Nashville. It was particularly hideous.
Rumpus: Were there any particular truths, obsessions, or interests that drove the stories in House Gone Quiet forward for you?
Norris: I think collectives and communities are probably the center. Communities could be a family, a support group, a town, a village, or an island, or the [American] South, generally. Thinking about belonging or not belonging to those things, even in “Choose Bliss,” where there’s a character who’s in isolation the whole time, except for some figments of her imagination, and reincarnations that come up. Even then, she’s searching for belonging within a larger spiritual context and is sort of unable to click into that. So loneliness, belonging, and the challenges that can come from a community drove these stories.
I’m a Black woman from the South—technically, mixed—and so I feel like there’s complexity built into that identity. Alabama is where my parents live and where I grew up. It’s very much home, but it’s not always the most welcoming place to me or people of othered or marginalized identities. I’m used to being in a space that feels comfortable in some ways but tense in other ways. I feel like that attuned me to writing these stories, as well.
Rumpus: The readers often experience this collective through point of view. It feels like we’re sitting with a first-person plural POV, even if we’re not. A great example of this is in the first story, “The Sound of Women Waiting,” where the narrative is driven by Satya’s voice, but she’s often speaking for the whole collective. There’s such a strong sense of we in how everything is happening to these women, and as readers, it’s often easy to forget the story is actually scoped through an individual, not the collective. Why is the power of the collective “we” such a lure for you in your storytelling?
Norris: In a lot of these stories and the places that might’ve inspired them, there’s a “we” and there’s individuals, and it’s not always easy to parse out their experiences. Writing I’s that are we’s and we’s that are I’s—I feel that gives me more space to explore that clash. Even when there are singular characters, oftentimes they’re operating from within a group.
One of the stories in this collection, “Stitch,” allowed me to do that. There are times where “we”—the group—is working through something together, or scenes where they’re doing a single action together, but of course they’re broken up into individuals. In that story, in particular, I’m saying, “We’ve all had this common experience, but it has been very different for all of us.”
Rumpus: Do these more experimental aspects of writing present as part of early drafts? Do you need to write a first draft before giving yourself permission to mess around with it?
Norris: I really like form and structure and playing with those—as a motivator to pull me through a story. I have to remember two things: I need to tell the story, but I also need to innovate the storyline with this little chunk of weirdness that I’m doing, like telling a story backward, or using dialogue, or whatever it is. Sometimes it can be intimidating to begin a story, but writing a story that you know is going to have a big cast of characters and that you want to tell with footnotes? That’s a smaller box for me to write into, even if that box ends up stretching and changing throughout the process of writing it.
I really like a broken-up telling, or a story that doesn’t go straight through—one that surprises and delights a reader. I prefer a story that does that, and so I feel like that’s the place where a lot of these [stories] started and thankfully the place where a lot of these were able to end. I learned that from writers like Karen Russell and Kevin Brockmeier. Their stories have alternative structures, but it doesn’t feel like a distraction—it feels like a necessary element.
For “Such Great Height and Consequence,” the first version of it had one footnote. The playfulness and the big cast of characters were there, but it just had this one strange footnote. In the second draft, the footnotes blew up. There were way more of them. In editing them, we pared them down to the most essential footnotes, so that you weren’t constantly interrupted and jumping back. At least when you did make that action, it felt like you had learned something important to the story.
“Salt” is one that took me a while to figure out, because I wanted setting to act like a character. I wanted place to be as loud as the people in it. In that sort of landscape, it is. It is playing a major role in the day-to-day. I don’t think it necessarily changed, but it took a while to get to where I was okay with how it functioned.
“Go Way Back,” which is told in second person and backward—that was always backward. I wrote the first draft of it and then I had to print it and rearrange it into chronological order to make sure I wasn’t telling information backwards. And then I had to change it back and make sure that the backwardness of that story—which starts out being a story between two people and ends up being a story about how two kinds of people could be together—I had to make sure the backwardness served it and was necessary, along with the “you” voice.
Within traditional literary landscapes, I have felt that playfulness with form wasn’t always celebrated as a thing that grown-up fiction writers did. Maybe it’s considered more sophisticated to be able to tell a story and tell it strong, straight through. There are writers who write that so beautifully, and that’s what they should be doing. For me, I hope having a good time writing something translates to a reader having some enjoyment of it, having some surprise and delight too.
I can remember picking up Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell at a bookstore—it must have been in college, home for a break—and in the stories in that collection, have structure-play and strange premises in them. And yet the humanness—the emotional quality of them—is not strange. Finding that familiar human element in such a strange world was really permission-giving for me. Like, you can write weird and still write emotional stories, and maybe they’re more emotional because they’re weird. I love leaving a story being like, “I can’t believe they pulled that off.” That often has to do with whatever the weirdness was of that story. Life’s weird. There’s reality in other places. I really like fiction and media that play with that strangeness.
Rumpus: Tell me more about what it means to write at the sentence level. What does it mean for you to really get in there and tinker?
Norris: It’s a strength and a weakness. Sometimes my attention to sentences and rhythm means everything becomes a little precious in the first draft. It sounds the way I want it to sound, so whether or not a sentence or section actually serves the story or makes sense, I can still be a little stubborn about it. It can definitely take me longer to kill my darlings. That’s why it’s been really helpful to get outside readers on stories. The most valuable feedback I get on short stories is about momentum. I don’t always need “Cut this line,” as much as, “Hey, right here is where I dip out and stop paying attention” or, “I’m not captured by the story at this point.” Those are always helpful notes to me.
I normally write short fiction longhand, and ideally, I write it in one to two sittings, so I can keep hearing it. My attention span is pretty bad, so just being able to sit with it helps me get the story done. So I write it longhand and when I go to transfer it to the computer, that’s one edit already through. I find it’s a lot easier to be mean to yourself when you’re writing on a computer. When you’re writing by hand, you’re like,“I’m just trying this out, no big deal.”
I normally write it out longhand, hoping that the rhythm and structure are going right. Sometimes that even means I’ll have syllable notations for myself. If there’s a word I want to use that I can’t remember, but I know it’s a two-syllable word, I’ll write two little dashes, which means “come back when you figure this out.” I wish there was a reverse dictionary, where you could type in, “What I mean to say is this . . .”and it would be like, “Girl, you mean this word.”
I don’t edit for a while. I prefer to leave it alone for a week, and then I circle back. When I edit, I always print things out. I’ll go through that, do a typo check, make general notes for myself, and then just sort of build from there. I move back and forth between editing a print-out and editing on the computer. I think all that means is I’m pretty focused on the sentence level, and hopefully all those sentences build to a constructive story.
Rumpus: How has being an editor helped rewire your thinking or process? Has it been a blessing or a curse?
Norris: Maybe it’s both things. I’m always ready to edit. As soon as I start writing something, I’m immediately thinking of the reader that’s going to encounter it. Whether that’s an editor or a reader or my mom—there are some stories in the collection where I started out with a fear like, “My family is going to react poorly to this!” And in reality, they were like, “We don’t care! Write whatever!” So I feel like a lot of that is self-inflicted and probably a little self-restricting.
That editorial eye has also been something I’ve had to turn when I’m working with another editor, because I value that editor’s opinion and I’m coming to them with a story I want and need help with. I need to be a little less hardheaded about my own opinions and listen to them as a spokesperson for how other people—who do not live inside my brain—are going to encounter the story.
A fair amount of these stories were published prior to them coming out in the collection, and in all of them, it was such a gift to be read closely and taken seriously, and to be able to collaborate with editors—like you, Rebecca. I’ve edited in the past, too, and that writer-editor relationship is something that I value. It’s a dream to be read and read generously, and to be read in a way that helps the stories become better.
Rumpus: What other writers or collections do you feel have given you permission to write the kind of stories you’ve wanted to write? You mentioned Karen Russell earlier.
Norris: I started early by reading Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, which has some spectacular sentences in it. Reading “Car-Crash While Hitchhiking” was one of the first times where I stopped in my tracks because of language. That was really important early on. Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties has stories that are thematically linked and are strange, structurally and premise-wise. That, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black were really exciting. They were instrumental, like: “You know, I want to write that kind of book as well.” AndI love Salt Slow by Julia Armfield. It has the weirdness—it has these crispy, beautiful, flowy, goopy sentences.
Short stories and story collections get this rap from the industry that they’re less marketable, less desirable than a novel. But there are times when I want to complete something small. It’s sort of like a movie versus a TV show, where you want to be able to have a concluding moment. It’s beautiful that you can start a short story before bed, complete it, and then go to sleep. I really love story collections. I feel like I’ve encountered some great ones. Hopefully someone likes one or a couple of the stories that are in this collection. I’m really excited that my first book gets to be a story collection.
Rumpus: What is next for you? What are you working on now?
Norris: I’m working on a novel, and it’s still figuring itself out. I feel like it’s a lot easier to stop working on a thing once you’ve tried to describe it. As is the case with a lot of my stories, they’re written on strange premises that don’t make the most sense out loud. but make sense on the page. I feel like a similar thing can happen with this novel. I’m just letting it sit while I’m figuring it out, but I’m enjoying a different form. That’s what I’m working on: figuring it out.
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Author photograph courtesy of Kelsey Norris
