Statistically speaking, if you’re going to pick up a random back issue of Quick Fiction you have a 38 percent chance of getting wowed by Kim Chinquee’s incredible talent. Her work has appeared in five issues (6, 7, 9, 12, 13) of Quick Fiction and in over a hundred other journals, including Noon, Denver Quarterly, Conjunctions, Fiction International, Notre Dame Review, Arkansas Review, Mississippi Review, and Pushcart Prize XXXI. She recently accepted a position at Buffalo State-SUNY teaching creative writing. Lucky kids…

I eagerly anticipated the release of Kim’s first collection Oh Baby: Flash Fictions and Prose Poetry—not only because I know Kim personally and that’s just cool, but also because I knew it would make a difference to see Kim’s work collected. And it does. When you read the book cover to cover you realize that the teeny, tiny flashes of brilliance you’ve seen dispersed in litmags have an overwhelming impact when compiled.   To mark the release of the book, I conducted the following interview with Kim via email.

Jennifer Pieroni (JP): I’ve been waiting for this book since I first read your work. I always knew this was coming. How about you? What was your process of collecting these particular stories how does it feel to finally have your debut collection in hand?

Kim Chinquee (KC): Thanks. No, I didn’t always know it was coming.  When I first started writing, I never imagined I’d be a published author. It was like this huge fantasy. The process of collecting these seemed less difficult than I imagined. I basically took the stories that I thought fit best in this style, with these themes, and shaped them and plucked some of them out, added a couple.

JP: Did this book stem out of your work with Cooper Renner of Elimae and into Cooper Renner of Ravenna Press? How did it evolve and how did your work together affect the finished product?

KC: Yes, many of these stories appear in Elimae–I’d been talking for some time with Cooper about the possibility of publishing with Ravenna, and the more we talked, the better it sounded, and over time, I’d accumulated more pieces. I basically put together almost all of the pieces from elimae, and then others that seemed to fit. The title piece, Oh Baby, was published in Elimae, and involves a mother and her baby and a plane crash, and that seemed, to me, central to the book.

JP: Tell us about the cover!

KC: Ravenna gave me a lot of freedom in the book’s design, and I asked one of my favorite  persons, Pier Rodelon, if he’d be interested in doing the cover, and I was thrilled that he said yes. I had fun looking at all the interesting images he found (from a public domain site). This one seemed the most provoking to me, and seemed to fit, with the setting, and the masks, and what the images suggest.

JP: I was particularly struck by Myfanwy Collins’ reaction to your book. She describes a really visceral and emotional response to your work. I wonder how it felt to be the creator of these stories? Was it an emotional experience for you as a writer?

KC: Thanks. Myfanwy is very generous! Her response revealed to me some things about the book I hadn’t noticed before, mostly about identity, the protagonist trying to figure out who she is, where she fits. Which is something I do all the time. I’ve had many roles in my life—growing up on a farm, being a mother, a girlfriend/wife/ex-wife, in the military, in the medical field, a teacher, an athlete, a writer, and I’ve lived so many different places. Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe all that I’ve experienced, in all those different places, all those situations. The pieces were written over a long period of time, a span of maybe six years, and I guess I don’t feel it was an overly emotional experience—it’s just writing—though some stories were more emotional for me than others. I think I focus more on details and not so much on emotion. Though the emotion is there, beneath the details. I love writing these short pieces, and putting the collection together was so exciting. After I chose the pieces to include, I probably edited the entire book over twenty times, cutting each piece more and more each time. That was both exciting and frustrating, which is probably what almost every writer experiences. I started obsessing too much about it, over every little word.

JP: Can you tell us a little bit about your creative process? Where do your stories come from? How long do they take to create?

KC: I use prompt words. Generally, I choose five prompt words and then from those words, I kind of “connect the dots.” Sometimes one word will spark my imagination, and then the next word might lead me to a new twist in plot, or scene, or detail. And then I’ll share it with my writing group (you!), Hotpants, and based on feedback and instinct and after having some distance from the work, I’ll revise. That’s how the shorter pieces usually work for me. If something’s been lingering in my head for a while, that usually ends up being the start of a longer story, and those don’t come as easily.  Sometimes I’ll write a short piece in a span of thirty minutes, and go back and revise it a little at a time. The longer stories take longer, of course—a few weeks to write, maybe, and then after I have distance, it takes many, many revisions, over many more weeks, and months. I’m still revising stories I wrote years ago, in grad school.

JP: What role does writing play in your life?

KC: I’m happy to be a writer. I write a lot. I teach. I read. I revise. I don’t think I’m as obsessed about writing as I used to be. When I started writing, I wanted so badly to be a “writer,” and I so desperately wanted to have a voice and be heard, but I was afraid that if I didn’t hurry up and have a voice that was interesting enough, then no one would ever care about what I had to say. That got tiring, and I’m not sure I’m “there” yet. I can’t imagine my life without writing. I didn’t start writing until I separated from the Air Force and went back to college and took a creative writing class. I was 28 then. That was 10 years ago. Yet I feel like I’ve been writing stories all my life.

JP: Who is your biggest critic and who is your biggest fan? How do these people influence your work?

KC: I’m not sure who my biggest fan is. But I admire mostly the work of my mentors. I keep their words of advice in mind as I revise, and edit. From Rick Barthelme, I learned the importance of cutting and adding twists and turns to make the work more interesting; I learned to let pages, characters, scenes go and practiced adding things entirely different and surprising. I also studied Cooper Renner’s edits of my pieces. And Diane Williams–she’s had a huge influence on my work–I send her almost everything I write. I also studied with Steve Barthelme and Mary Robison and Richard Powers and Jean Thompson, and I read and study their work as well.