“Never stop telling stories”: An Interview with Kate McGunagle

“I like being edgy and provocative; I like going into territory that people find to be uncomfortable because I think that’s where we’re the most human.”

Kate McGunagle (she/they) is a queer writer, playwright, multimedia visual artist, and graduate of Boston University’s M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing and Princeton University. Kate is deeply interested in art and stories that wrestle with the seemingly impossible — those that examine queer bodies, experience, and pleasure, interrogate rape culture and gendered violence, and revel in the spaces between social categories and within ordinary life. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Five Points, Passages North, The Whitefish Review, and The North American Review. Their essay “Passive Voice” was the recipient of the 2021 Terry Tempest Williams Prize in Creative Nonfiction and was recognized as a Notable Essay in the Best American Essays 2022. They are the author behind the Substack Bardette. Kate was a 2022–23 fellow through the Tennessee Playwrights Studio. Plays include M (TPS), Sister of Mine (October 2023 world premiere via the Strides Collective), Cat Things, As We Fucking Like It, and Judith Goes to Church.

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Did you always know you wanted to be an author, and what made you think of starting to write?

Great question. Yes, I always knew, and I know not many people will have that response, but as soon as I could grasp a pencil or even understand the idea of telling a story, I was doing it. I still have all of my childhood journals and these little scraps of construction and printer paper that I would doodle all over. I just always knew that I was a storyteller, and for me, that was always a combination of images and words. If I wasn’t just writing a story, I was also drawing to illustrate that story or making pictures that told stories. The two go hand-in-hand for me, which is why I’m a very visual writer and playwright.

Are you part of the LGBTQ community?

Yes. I identify as queer and genderqueer, and I really don’t feel that we have sufficient vocabulary sometimes to encompass queerness and sexuality, but for now, those are the terms that resonate the most for me. As you can tell from my writing, queerness is a big part of my storytelling and is a huge part of my lived experience. It is my favorite part about myself. I love being a part of this community and being an advocate for this community through the stories that I tell. I don’t want to just tell stories that are personal to me. I want to tell stories that are relatable and vulnerable and explore corners of queerness that people might not have yet explored or are too afraid to talk about or are censored in today’s day and age. I want to tell those uncomfortable, beautiful, and brave truths.

I love that. Also, I just want to make sure what your preferred pronouns are.

Thanks for asking! She/they. Either works for me: a combination or one or the other; both are great.

Cool! My next question focuses specifically on your life, especially with the experience of life. For you, what critical life events have shaped your writing?

My own coming-out process and my understanding of my queerness has certainly been an evolving process in parallel to my own evolving sexuality and gender identity. I would say I grew up in a very conservative, rural part of Montana: a small western town where I just didn’t have examples of lived queerness and safe queerness, so that’s why my coming-out process took so long. I also come from a religious upbringing, like a lot of my queer friends, so I internalized so much homophobia and so much fear that it took me some time to really come to terms with my own queerness. I think that sense of loneliness and isolation is something that I continue to explore in my writing because it’s something I know but continues to be something that a lot of queer folks experience. Also, I would say I’m a survivor of domestic violence and sexual assault, so gendered violence is another theme that’s important for me. Given where we are today, there is still so much gendered violence happening — especially against our trans folks — and so I will continue to explore this impulse to violence that we have as humans against things that we’re afraid of. I would say that those are the larger themes that relate to my personal experiences that appear in my writing.

Audiences are super important when it comes to being an author, so what do you hope they take away from your writing?

For me, I care deeply about people feeling seen. I know that stories saved my life so many times as a young person. The only place I could feel seen was in a book or watching a production performance. Sometimes movies, but primarily books. Part of why I write is to give back. I want to be there for people who are searching for someone to see them and someone to hear them. I want them to experience my stories and feel seen. Another part that I want people to take away is that I like being edgy and provocative; I like going into territory that people find to be uncomfortable because I think that’s where we’re the most human. I think it’s where we learn about ourselves, and when I’ve explored things that make me uncomfortable or unsettled, I’ve learned so much about what I’m afraid of and what’s disconnecting me from people. I also want people sometimes to feel uncomfortable or compelled to ask difficult questions of themselves and of other people, so I like to create seenness, but I also like to create unsettledness. Gentle provocations.

Yes. I love that. A story wouldn’t be a story without tension and suspense, and you generate that very well.

Before our conversation, I researched you briefly to familiarize myself with your work. Obviously, you’re a playwright, but I’ve learned that you also dabble a little bit with fiction and creative nonfiction. I’m wondering if your writing technique changes when writing in these various genres. Also, do you encounter any unexpected challenges when writing in these different styles?

I’m going to answer this in several different ways. I feel that I’ve always struggled with my writing because I’ve been drawn to so many genres. I love fiction; that’s where I began as a writer. I have an MFA in creative writing, in fiction specifically, but then I started telling my own stories, and that’s where creative nonfiction kind of jumped into the scene, where I realized, “Oh, actually, I don’t really feel as compelled to be writing about fictional characters. I want to write about real events that have happened because those feel powerful enough for me right now,” so I kind of veered into the territory of creative nonfiction for a couple of years. Then I discovered playwriting: “Oh, here’s another genre I love.” I think I’ve felt challenged by society’s desire to have us just do one thing as creatives, where if you’re a writer, be an excellent poet but nothing else or be an outstanding essayist but nothing else. I think there’s a resistance to multidimensionality when it comes to writing. I guess I internalized that where I was like, “Well, I don’t really know what writer I am. How do I encompass all of this? What genre do I stick with?” and I think for me, it comes down to which genre does the story want to be told in. Sister of Mine wanted to be a play; there was no other way for me to tell that story. The short story I gave you, “Girls,” needed to be that short story, and then I needed to tell my personal story in “Girl Wanting” as an essay. For me, it comes down to asking the story itself how it wants to be told, and I think in adopting that perspective, my voice has become slightly unified, but I would say that my voice is much more irreverent and free in my playwriting. My voice feels less restricted when I’m in that genre, probably because, as a genre, I think it’s more acceptable to be experimental. In some of the more experimental writing I’ve done in fiction and nonfiction, I’ve had a more challenging time creating an audience because there are so many rules, traditionalists, and ideas about what fiction should be. If my voice changes, it becomes more liberated when I’m writing plays, but the irreverence, playfulness, and humor I have comes out across the board. It just comes down to what the story wants and how it wants to be told.

I have a follow-up question. I love the idea of you telling the story based on how it wants to be told. You explained that the story, in a sense, chooses the writing style automatically, but how does a story come about? Do you develop a story beforehand and start thinking, “Okay, logistically, how am I going to create this?” Can you explain that process to me?

Definitely, I love that; that’s a great question. So, my writing process with stories: It always kind of begins with a feeling or an image. With the story “Girls,” for example, I was living in a small town in Montana called Livingston, a beloved town. I still love that place. Then COVID hit, and I lived alone in drafty old apartments and wandered the tiny town’s streets. The movie theater had a sign that said, “We’ll be closed for a while,” and I thought it was hilarious. Here we have this vast global pandemic, and the theatre’s sign read very vaguely, “We’ll be closed for a while.” No reasoning. No context. That stayed with me, and “Girls” evolved from that one image — one that was from an actual lived experience. Then, it just kind of quickly became a short story. I’d wanted to write about adolescence for a long time in a small Montana town — female adolescence specifically. Similarly, with Sister of Mine, I just had this image of two women in a space that they couldn’t leave, and they had to figure their shit out in that space. I thought, “Okay, I don’t know what to make of this, but this image will not go away.” The only format that seemed to make sense for this idea was a theatrical setting, so it’s almost like when the image or idea comes to me, it comes with the genre already. I saw those two actresses on stage for Sister of Mine, unable to leave, having to face their shit. I saw the young women in “Girls” scootering around Livingston during a hot summer, and I knew that needed to be a story; it’s a very internal, intuitive process that comes all at once.

Wow. I love that. To become a better writer and have these images planted in my head, I feel like I can’t truly practice being creative, but I can live and experience. Living and observing people forms my understanding of the world. The next challenge is translating these observations into writing.

Absolutely. Everything that I create comes from noting observations. I just went to the grocery store this morning and noticed people. I saw the old man with his New Yorker tote bag pausing by the bucket of watermelons on his way out of the grocery store, and I wondered, “What is he thinking?” There’s a whole story there at that moment. All you need to start telling stories is to observe and note people’s behavior and daily interactions because humans are undeniably fascinating. We do weird things, have weird routines, and all have many of the exact [same] needs. We can make so much out of a lot of ordinary things. We could tell so many stories about that; there are so many meanings to be had, so I believe it’s all around you, but yes, living life is vital to being creative.

Absolutely. Okay, so now I want to switch gears a little bit. I want to discuss Sister of Mine a little bit further. I don’t remember, but I think you propose the distinguishing of reality and truth at the beginning of the play. Could you explain that idea a little bit more?

Yes. I’m a truthteller, and that’s how I like to identify in so many ways. I love speaking truth to power, and I love telling stories that center around a specific truth, but something that I learned about truth is that truth from one person is not necessarily a truth for another. When we ask, “What is true for you?” truth becomes very subjective. When it comes to intense personal experiences like these two characters, I wanted to get closer to this idea of what could be a shared truth for them. Can we find a common truth in feeling? Despite the common myth of reality being objective, reality itself is subjective. The dance between truth and reality is kind of tongue-in-cheek, in a way. It’s like an oxymoron where we say, “In reality, this is what happened,” but is it? Because I’m telling the story based on my experience, is there such a thing as objectivity? Is there such a thing as a core truth? I think this play gets at what could be true and that is shared between two people, if possible. Is that something that we can find? I don’t have an answer; I never try to answer anything overtly in my work. If anything, I leave people with more questions, but that’s kind of what I’m getting at with that interplay in this piece particularly.

The names of the characters A and Z aren’t revealed in the play. Why did you keep their names unknown?

I love the idea of shortening names to just letters; it’s actually been something that has drawn my attention as a writer for various reasons. In a lot of my creative nonfiction, I would abbreviate names to protect the privacy of the people I was talking about, and then, as I was doing that, I found that I liked it. I thought it was actually kind of poetic in a way, and, for me, with A and Z, I wanted to suggest this idea of comprehensiveness and the entire alphabet. The full gamut of letters; they encompass the whole thing. From A to Z. I also did want them to be, in a way, indistinguishable. Obviously, A begins the alphabet, and Z ends it, but how different is a beginning and an ending? The whole play is about how that could be reversed and flipped on its head, so I wanted to play with the idea of them being simultaneously very similar yet different.

When you were writing this play, what was your main intention for writing it? Do you feel that you accomplished it?

I began writing this piece with my idea: two women unable to leave a stage. However, later on, I realized as I was writing it that there was a personal intention, and I did have an experience similar to A and Z where I had a beloved childhood friend who was my first love, but I didn’t know it. I had no idea I was queer, completely closeted. I was so in love with her and then our friendship ended rather abruptly, and I spent years trying to figure out why I’m trying to salvage it and recover it. When I was writing this piece, I’d been spending years trying to tell that story of my beloved childhood friend and not really getting anywhere with it, so as I started to write Sisters of Mine, I realized that this is my story finally wanting to be told to move that grief through me. Indeed, this play is not about my friend and me; A and Z are very different characters, and that’s how it often works for me. If I’m working from a real-life story, the characters step out of that and carry the same emotional resonance, but they become their own beings, so A and Z stepped out of my story and beautifully did their own thing. My intention for the piece was to capture the emotional core of my experience with my first love. I also wanted it to be tight and uncomfortable, and I wanted it to be like a duet that people couldn’t stop listening to. I feel that I arrived at that intention, but I also think I’ll always be arriving at that intention because plays feel so alive; they never feel fully finished. When I saw it produced back in October, I felt like I saw a new version of that duet and could understand the story differently. I do think that my original intention of processing my own grief has been met, but I also achieved writing a beautiful story of two queer female friends figuring out their love for each other. Even with understanding my play’s achievements, I know the story will continue to evolve as it continues to be produced.

Honestly, that’s one of my favorite things about playwriting. I actually just took a playwriting class with Dr. Barnett this past semester, and I loved it so much. The first play I wrote was about a grandmother and her grandson, where he finds out that she is dying of cancer. Hearing a staged reading of my play in front of an audience was a magical moment that provided new insights into my play. The liveliness of theatre — having live actors and a live audience — allows each play performance to be beautifully unique. You’ll never have the exact show you envision since there is so much versatility and creativeness that goes into producing a play; each production, despite all of the actors speaking the same words, will lead audiences into a whole new world of the characters’ lives and fixate on different themes. This idea of plays being unique is what draws me into theatre. It allows me to understand and analyze every word a character says. No word is too insignificant in a play; a single word and how it is performed can immediately shape an audience’s perspective on a character and its directorial message. I would love to see this play live because it would give me a whole new perspective on this story: it would show me how subjective and human it is because we are so different. Theatre allows us to learn more about who humans are, how we live, and how we experience.

I love that you had that experience of seeing your words brought to life. That really is a powerful moment, where writing goes from being this very isolated, private thing and suddenly to this very collaborative, collective thing, and I think that’s the power of theater that I always knew out of the young person who was a performer. I was a performer all of my high school and college years. I never thought about how playwriting could be a medium for me, but it’s magical because we go into that space, the lights go down, and we start to see this story come to life. It’s so electrifying and humanizing, and there’s so much empathy and potential for compassion and understanding — and I’m happy you’ve had that experience. It was transformative for me the first time I heard my work read aloud. I thought of that experience as powerful and collaborative, but I also dawned on the hope that my writing would positively impact people’s lives.

One of the most challenging parts of writing a play is figuring out how it will be performed on a stage. In Sister of Mine, since A and Z keep jumping into different fantasies using the time-keeping device, how were you thinking about feasibly transforming that from writing to performance?

When I was writing the piece, I wanted it to be very stark and minimalist, so I wrote it mainly intending to give the director full reign to make of it what they would. Initially, the time-keeping device was a kitchen egg timer, but then I generalized it to the time-keeping device so directors would have more versatility in what exactly it is. For example, directors could use a stadium clock with glaring red lights, an analog clock, or many different clocks as the time-keeping device. I wanted to create a blank canvas for creatives to take that story and run with it. When it was produced in October, the director chose to have an analog clock that you could press the top of to set an alarm and a ladder and demarcations of what was a fantasy space and what was reality. A and Z also had a bunch of suitcases that contained all their props for each fantasy they unpacked. They literally unpacked their shit throughout the whole piece, which I loved, but I believe it could be done in so many different ways in terms of elevating the set and having various levels and blocks, other lighting themes, and different sounds. However, for me, that didn’t feel as important as writing the piece and telling the charged story between the two, but I would hope that the director would be excited by this and do whatever they wanted to do with it in terms of what they felt needed to be represented.

I love this because you are allowing these directors to create and further develop the world you have made. You can learn more about your work by seeing how others perceive it. Also, Dr. Barnett always instilled in her playwriting students the idea that they should not worry about how to produce the play. Instead, that’s what the directors are for, and it probably makes their job more fun. Creating a world that isn’t already spelled out for them allows directors more flexibility when exploring new themes and generating new understandings of a play.

It does! Yeah! And I think that’s brilliant advice from her because it also has helped me not rely so much on stage directions. Instead, I’ve learned to trust that you’re giving this play to intelligent creatives who can take a story and bring it to life. You don’t need to say as much as you think you do. You can trust an intelligent production team, and I believe that has been very liberating advice for me. Sometimes, I think I’d be a little bit too spare, so I’ve been challenging myself to include a little bit more stage directions, but it is definitely a balance that you can strike as you see fit as a playwright, which is a great lot of fun.

I have one more question for you. What would you say to any queer or questioning people right now?

I have a great love for them, first and foremost, so I would say I love you. I would say your story matters, and no story is too small. No story is too ordinary, too common, too insignificant. Every story matters, so I would tell them to remember that and to know that if they aren’t feeling seen, they can create the pathways to that seenness because all of us are working hard to do that. I’m working hard to make that pathway for them, but I would tell them I celebrate, love, and see them and always will. The most important thing for them to remember is that they must begin by loving, seeing, and celebrating themselves. That’s where the magic happens. When you start to find connection and seenness with other people, you find that within yourself, so don’t stop telling your stories because they matter, and we’re listening.

Nicholas Perrone is a junior at MTSU pursuing degrees in Political Science and Economics with a minor in Writing. He is also the intern for the Fall 2024 In-Process Series.