Evidently, there are many great American writers. But sometimes it can feel as though American fiction is dominated by relatively linear narrative form, with a heavy emphasis on psychological realism. If you limit yourself to a certain kind of American literary fiction, it's easy to forget about the different kinds of books that are being written. You can forget to be ambitious, both as a reader and a writer.
Katie KitamuraI don't speak any languages well enough to make an expert assessment on writing in translation, but since I'm interested in awkwardness in prose, I find I like the way translated texts can sometimes acquire awkwardness in the process of translation. There's a discordance translation can create which I think is sometimes seen as a weakness but which I think can be a really interesting aspect of the text.
Katie KitamuraI don't know why I write. The honest answer is that I don't have an answer. I wouldn't die if I couldn't write fiction. Actually keel over and die - it's unlikely. But quite quickly writing has come to feel like the only thing I really know how to do. And I go a bit stir crazy if I don't write more or less every day. But that makes writing sound like a mood-regulator, a way to regulate anxiety or depression, and it doesn't really come down to that.
Katie KitamuraTranslated literature can be fascinating. There's something so intriguing about reading the text second hand - a piece of prose that has already been through an extra filter, another consciousness, in the guise of the translator. Some of my favorite writers who have written in English were doing so without English being their first language, so there's a sense of distance or of distortion there, too. Conrad. Nabokov. These writers were employing English in interesting ways.
Katie KitamuraI write some art criticism, and one thing that's clear to me is that politics is fashionable in the American art world in a way it maybe isn't in American fiction. Your work of art becomes fashionable the moment it has some kind of political commentary. I think this has its dangers - the equation between fashion, politics, and art is problematic for obvious reasons. Nonetheless, the notion of politics as being de rigueur in the world of fiction is almost unthinkable. In fiction in America at the moment, the escape into whimsy is far more prevalent than the political.
Katie KitamuraI believe writers should be able to write about anything - anything - but there is also a sense in which your lived experience shapes what you write and what you don't write.
Katie KitamuraIt's a hard thing to examine and difficult to speak for other writers, but when I look at my own writing there is often too much reticence. And that's a flaw I have as a person as well. I'm too reticent. I'm non-confrontational to a fault. And I'm risk-averse, which probably shows in my sentences. The aversion to long lines, the tendency to strip things back and be spare. My writing is an act of erasure that's tied up with my personality. I can easily produce a ninety thousand word chunk of writing and then cut back and back until I've only got ten thousand words. Or nothing.
Katie Kitamura