Steve Kistulentz: Interview and Bio

Steve Kistulentz is the author of Panorama, named a most anticipated novel of 2018 by the Chicago Review of Books, and a must read selected by publications as diverse as Entertainment Weekly and the New York Post. He is also the author of two collections of poetry, Little Black Daydream (2012), an editor’s choice selection in the University of Akron Press Series in Poetry, and The Luckless Age (2010), selected from over 700 manuscripts as the winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award. He teaches at Saint Leo University in Florida, where he serves as the founding director of the graduate creative writing program.
Kistulentz was born in Washington, DC. He earned a BA in English from the College of William and Mary, an MA from the Johns Hopkins University, an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and a PhD from the Florida State University. He lives in the Tampa area with his family.
JS: What is the in process work you’re sharing with us at your event?
SK: I’m reading from a novel that is so early in the process that it doesn’t really even have an official title yet. As of now, I’m calling it The General Secretary. I like that title quite a bit, because it has the kind of vagueness that I think most serious novels have. I don’t think anyone looks at a copy of Mao II or Underworld by Don DeLillo and has any concept of the ambition of those books, and I’ll admit that this feels like a very ambitious project to me. And that’s part of my process always, to stretch myself a bit. I don’t want to do the same thing twice.
JS: What do you need to know about a project before you start writing?
SK: I don’t really get a huge amount of momentum until I have a first line that I feel like has a sense of grandeur and really invites a reader into the novel. For my first novel, Panorama, I had four sentences that I thought were the opening line of the book, but it wasn’t until I settled on one that I was able to complete a first draft that resembled something that a reader might recognize as being close to the final book.
JS: What are common traps for aspiring writers?
SK: This will sound flippant, but the most common trap is life. I know so many talented artists in every field who gave up what they were good at because the ups and downs of writing, or painting, or playing in a band was too much of a sense of constant upheaval. I feel that way at times, particularly when the writing isn’t going well. The only way I can make that feeling go away is to know that I am making progress in my work.
I would say that the other trap that is most prevalent is career jealousy. It’s poisoned a lot of early career writers. While I’m not naïve enough to think that I can say anything that will stop you from being envious of someone else’s success, what I can tell you is that you have to approach it as motivation. I’ve always been competitive by nature, from youth league sports to playing tennis now, and I’ve had to work to temper that instinct in my writing. I’m doing my best work when I’m competing only with myself. Was I a better writer today? Did I do something that will inform my work tomorrow? Did I work? Those are questions that can sustain you over the long haul.
Lastly, I’d say that you have to find encouragement in odd places. I love underdog stories in movies — show me an unlikely hero, like Mike Eruzione and Jim Craig, or Rudy, or the 1983 North Carolina State basketball team, or gimpy Kirk Gibson hitting a home run to win a World Series game — and I’ll cry like a baby. And I’ll use that to get back to work. One of my mentors, Richard Bausch, is fond of saying that anything good was written a little at a time, over a long period of time, and was born swimming in the author’s doubt. That seems like the truest thing to say to any writer struggling to find confidence in their work.
JS: What is your writing Kryptonite?
SK: Guilt. I take a lot of time away from the desk to work on being a better person, a better husband, a better dad. I grew up in a household where there was a lot of tension, a lot of pretending, and mostly a lot of tiptoeing around one very volatile person. So sometimes the best thing I can do to be a better person isn’t necessarily the best thing for my writing, but I made that choice years ago and I’m sticking with it.
JS: What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer?
SK: When I started grad school, I was 36, and that meant that I often had much more in common with the faculty than I did with any of my classmates. Mark Winegardner was my dissertation director at Florida State, and he’s always a call or text away. Same with friends from Iowa like Chris Offutt. I bonded with a handful of fellow students at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop over wings and NFL Sunday Ticket; that includes my friend Tom McAllister, who is one of those guys who just keeps his head down and writes and his books are warm and harrowing and funny and just so well done. I hate naming names because I don’t want anyone to feel left out, but one of the things that makes me happy is to know how I am connected to all of these amazingly diverse and talented people. My classmates at Iowa included Yiyun Li, Daniel Alarcon, Anna Solomon, Nam Le, and Edan Lepucki. Seeing the good work they did at Iowa, and the good kind people that they all are was a huge motivation and a huge gift all at once. I came to Iowa fond of long stories where not much happened, and mostly what I learned from my friends there was tough love. They pretty much told me that it was a good idea to put a story in along with all that flowery language. And they were absolutely right on the money. The British novelist Jim Crace read an opening 40 pages or so of a novel of mine and he looked at me and said, in his Birmingham accent, “It’s a bit baggy, isn’t it?” as if we were sitting at the pub, friend to friend. I saw some of those writers I mentioned above nodding in agreement, and it started to click. And it was reinforced by great teachers like Ethan Canin, Elizabeth McCracken, Edward Carey, Jennifer Vanderbes, Jim Hynes, Julianna Baggott, and Robert Olen Butler. With Panorama, my most recent book, I feel like I could point to something in the book that started with a conversation from any one of the people I’ve listed here.
JS: How did publishing your first book change your process of writing?
SK: At the risk of sounding flippant, there was about four hours of huge joy on two separate days: the day you find out that the book has sold, and the day the box shows up on your doorstep. The rest is kind of a process that can be very anxiety-ridden if you aren’t careful. When my first book arrived at my house, I had a total panic attack because I knew I did not want to be one of those people who only published one orphan volume. So if anything, maybe it made me work a bit harder and a bit more consistently. And I pay more attention to every detail now, and ask questions, and try to learn so that I can be a better partner for the next book.
JS: How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have?
SK: I have a weird little book that is essentially a novella that was done, and then I lost confidence in it. But I love the people in it and they keep showing up in other things I write, so maybe that one will see the light of day in some other iteration.
I have titles and opening chapters to maybe four other novels. Grady Tripp, the professor-novelist in Michael Chabon’s book Wonder Boys, has a well-regarded novel called The Arsonist’s Daughter, and I was so enamored of that title that I wrote about 100 pages of a book with that name before the camp of the idea just wore off.
And I have one complete mess of a book that didn’t sell. Looking back, I’m able to admit that I wrote it out of anger. It was a 1970s book, and I wrote it because I really did not care for the revisionist history of film and television that was trying to make the 1970s this nostalgic wonderland of family and comedy. I wrote a book where people destroyed every relationship they had, where a sibling killed another sibling (albeit accidentally) and at the end, a hurricane was coming to wipe out the rest of this particularly put-upon family. And it was a well-written piece of depressing prose. And it got very far in the process, and then an editor at a famous publishing house pulled me aside and explained to me that it was a dark book, and a bad one, and that she’d gladly consider then next thing I wrote. And I went home after that conversation and realized that what I was writing was the unrelenting chaos of my life at the time. And I put that book away, and I’m hugely grateful for that conversation.
Dr. Steve Kistulentz will be the first In Process speaker. His event is Thursday, September 6 at 4:30 pm at the Sam H. Ingram Building MT Center. The event is free and open to the public.

