In Northampton with Kelly Link and her community of like-minded writers.
White Cat, Black Dogis out from Random House March 28.
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Kelly Link lives in a yellow farmhouse in Northampton with her husband, the editor Gavin J.
Grant, and their 14-year-old daughter, Ursula.
When I arrived on a snowy night in January, she offered me wool slippers and tea.
We settled at the kitchen table beside a potted sweet-potato vine that had sprouted in the pantry.
I didnt have the heart to … She petted the leaves.
It was so determined.
In the stories of Kelly Link, strange things happen in otherwise ordinary options.
Pressed to explain these phenomena, Links characters tend to change the subject.
For much of that time, she has worked in relative obscurity.
Early reviewers were impressed by her originality, but she remained largely unknown outside of M.F.A.
programs and fantasy circles.
That has changed as Links stature has grown.
Like Link, they draw on old storytelling forms, including fairy tales and Greek myths.
I feel like she put her fingers in my eyeballs and gave me powers, Machado said.
But they share Links interest in the esoteric and the uncanny.
Eventually, they turned to the challenges of revision.
She turned to Link.
Theres stuff about your process we will nevertrulyunderstand, she said.
Link, soft-spoken and unassuming, protested that she wasnt so unusual.
I think thats true in general about the revision process, she replied.
She was cocooned in a green sweater, little moons and cat skulls dangling from her ears.
The reasons are sometimes very opaque but satisfying to the person who makes them.
Link herself is a bit opaque, too.
She said she doesnt enjoy writing and only does it because she finds it interesting.
She told a revealing anecdote.
Starting in 2003, Jackson wrote a story on the bodies of 2,095 volunteers.
She arranged for each volunteer to get one word from the story tattooed onto their skin.
Only those who bore the ink were allowed to read the full version.
Link got a word (SKIN) on her clavicle, but shes never wanted to read the story.
He performed a series of personality tests on her and her siblings.
He refused to share the results with them.
If I told you, she remembered him saying, it would define how you think of yourself.
I thought,Youre right, it would be better not to know.
(She went to therapy once and decided it was not going to work.)
One winter, there was a frost.
Driving home one day, they saw a lizard on the side of the road and took it home.
It lived on our patio for a few months, she said.
Sometimes Link would wear a pet boa constrictor to school like a belt.
There was not a lot of definition between the inside and the outside world, she said.
In 1987, Link enrolled at Columbia to study creative writing.
One of her professors showed a few chapters of a novel shed started writing to his agent and editor.
It was about a woman whose son has dug an enormous hole in the backyard, Link said.
The tiebreaker was the question Why do you want to go around the world?
Her answer: Because you cant go through it.
The novel hardens as you go on, she said.
At a certain point the ambitions, even the shape, begin to feel inevitable.
The short story stays fluid.
After getting an M.F.A.
They put out her first collection,Stranger Things Happen,themselves.
Ive heard others refer to it as the Small Beer aesthetic, she told me.
Oh wow, Link replied.
Over the pandemic, Link finally wrote a novel.
Watching Clare and Black at work over the years piqued her interest in the form.
I began thinking Id like to tackle some of those same problems, she said.
Those problems have at times overwhelmed her.
I felt like I was wading through a swamp.
Link wrote her new collection while taking short breaks from that project.
She noted that these stories reveal a change in her sensibility.
The previous collection was very much about bad behavior, she said.
Even so, they are as eerie as any of her earlier tales, marked by her characteristic elusiveness.
Theyre fighting over resources, she said.
She admitted the draft was getting messy.
Im going to have to rewrite it, she said.
Thats what happens, Link replied.
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