The Fortnightly Interview: Do It For The Mystery
Kathleen Rooney is interviewed by Joshua Corey and Robert Archambeau.
The Fortnightly Review caught up with Kathleen Rooney at the Arts Club of Chicago, sweeping past the callipygian abstractions of the Huguette Caland exhibit and past the Calder mobile that guards the staircase to find the poet, novelist, publisher, and former Senatorial aide seated in the dining room. Once the logistics of lunch had been settled, the talk flowed.
The Fortnightly Review: What can you tell us about your attraction to historical fiction?
Kathleen Rooney: One of the reasons I like writing historical fiction is that I want to know what it was like to live as a person in a different era. I read something by another writer of historical fiction who said that if you don't know how people in the era that you're writing about would have gone to the bathroom, you're not ready to start writing the book. Of course people's mileage may vary: if you're doing something more speculative, or you don't care that much about the era, the statement might not apply to you, but it applies to me. I love the lost. History is just the old ways people used to do things. I just read this book, Memoir from Antproof Case, by Mark Halperin. It's not historical fiction per se, but it's about a character who's lived almost a hundred years and so much of what he writes about is the loss of beautiful ways. He goes on this rant about how it is to be in modern buildings, where his windows won't open. Or how we've given up the beauty of having horses in our cities for the sake of these ugly, extremely dangerous cars. Part of the appeal of writing in that genre, though I also write contemporary stuff, is that I just want to nail the historical details. My goal is to never have anyone contact me and say “you got that wrong.” And so far I've never gotten one of those like letters from someone and had it be right.
TFR: Do you do extensive research before you begin writing? Or do you write until you realize you have reached a hole in your knowledge?
KR: The research part of the novel is a beautiful trap. Whenever I write anything, whether it's contemporary or not, I always start with research because I like to fill the tank and then just drive. Even for the non-historical novel that I have coming out in the summer of 2026, Man Overboard!, I did a ton of research to make sure I know what it would be like to fall into the ocean and try to survive for twenty hours—because I don't know what that's like. I love research and you could stay out and research forever. For many people, research happens most intensely at the outset of a project, and so it's that sense of potential energy versus kinetic energy. The ball at the top of the hill is waiting to be pushed down. And I think when you're at that potential energy point, you're able to tell yourself it's going to be awesome. It's going to be worth it. It's going to be great when it's done. And hopefully it will be, but realistically, we all know that not everything always works out. So I think there is that fear of going from the moment when the ball is at the top of the hill and the hypothetical novel is still perfect to feeling “okay, this novel will be pretty good, but I might not be able to do every single thing I wanted to do.” You'll never know enough. You could stay in the research forever. But I can tell the difference between when I'm doing productive research and when I'm doing procrastination research.
TFR: In addition to writing fiction—historical and otherwise—you’ve been an essayist and a poet. You're still very engaged with poetry, in part through your Rose Metal Press. Do you experience writing these genres differently?
KR: When you're writing poetry, it's not so much a market as “What contest am I going to win?” or “How many submission fees is it going to be before I find somebody who wants to publish me?” My last poetry collection [Where Are the Snows] came out in 2022, and it won the X.J.Kennedy Prize, which I recommend everyone try for, because they pay you $10,000, which for is good for anything, but for poetry it's just bananas. With fiction I do think more about the market—not as a deterministic thing, but just because I write commercial fiction and I have an agent. So it's hard to not think about that at all. I love to think about audience—not in a who-will-buy-this way, but like I’m being courteous to another person, imagining that future other person I’ll be having this conversation with. So I think in fiction that future person does include not only an imagined, fun reader, but also my agent and the editor that she's going to send the manuscript to, and then the marketing team that's going to have to be convinced that they should roll the dice on the book. I think fiction is the hardest thing to do well. It's common to see a very young person be an extremely good poet, but it's rarer to see a young person be like a very strong fiction writer. To me, fiction is the most architectural genre. Writing a poem is like designing a room, but writing a novel is like building a whole house. And it's not just like doing a drawing of a house. With a lot of young people's fiction, it’s as if the person has seen a lot of houses, and makes a good drawing of a house, but it's not a house that could be built, or lived in. It takes a while to be able to pull off fiction on the scale of a novel. Also, there’s a high degree of insight that a lot of people want fiction to have—there are many types of fiction but I mean in fiction that focuses on psychological interiority or is character- or voice-driven. I think it can be harder to do that when you're twenty than when you're even like twenty-nine. But young people often have a lot of self-belief in what they can do.
TFR: Does it matter to have that unearned self-belief?
KR: Yeah, I think that's crucial. You get nowhere if you don't have it. So, thank God young people have that.
TFR: Preparing for this interview, we tried to formulate a sentence that would cover the central themes of your writing and failed miserably. I believe the best we could come up with is “Kathleen Rooney writes books about female visibility,” thinking about how Doreen O’Day in From Dust to Stardust is a big-screen movie star, or how Lillian Boxfish in Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk is a kind of flâneuse, a woman wandering in public. And of course there’s the art modeling memoir, Live Nude Girl.
KR: I think you're partly right. But I’m more interested in people who try to use their time on Earth to do something that's bettering—not in some kind of boring, moralist way.
TFR: But you write a good scoundrel. Jack in From Dust to Stardust is a great scoundrel: a dangerous person to for Doreen to know, yet you see why they're still together.
KR: Yeah, totally. That's why I hesitated to say that because it could sound like I'm writing this Horatio Alger, goody-goody stuff. I'm really interested in people who ask what it means to have personal integrity and what does it mean to be at peace and like who you are and what you're trying to do. I think that's because I struggle with that as a person. It's fun to ask how would your character have handled your situation? Or to ask how this person met a very specific biographical challenge that I may never meet? That's why I like fiction and the kind of fiction I write, which is very character driven. It's so fun to have a chance to go into people's heads and see what they do when I put them in a crazy situation. Like with the scoundrel Jack. He’s this terrible husband who tries to kill Doreen twice. You know what it is in her that makes her stay with him the first time, and what is it in him that makes him appealing enough that he can get away with dangling her out a hotel window. He promises he'll never do it again. He probably means it.
TFR: I will broadly say that our generation wrote to achieve a certain kind of visibility. And I don't know what it would be like to come up now, to be a twenty-year-old writer rising today. To choose writing as my means of visibility would seems almost countercultural now. Or maybe their impulses for writing are different.
KR: You know, I just always liked reading and always wanted to be a writer. No matter what happened to me, I was going to be a writer. I think there's probably always just a certain set of people who are going to say that's what they want to do, not because they want to be visible, but just because that's where they feel at home, that's where they feel they can sort out their feelings about life and connect with other people. For some people it's a pleasurable thing to just to look at little black marks on a white background on a page.
TFR: I often feel bad for poets my age or above, because many of them suffer the delusion that they were going to somehow be famous and immortal. I wonder if it's better or worse for novelists, because in some types of fiction that hope is not necessarily entirely a delusion. That is, you that there is actual hope of visibility in that genre, slim though it may be.
KR: The question relates to a larger one: What's the point of being alive? What do we leave if we have kids, or if we make art, or if we do some important historical thing? Why does it even matter? On my good, happy days, it all matters because being good is its own reward and trying to do what you can do should be enough. But on my darker days, it's very existential and it's as if there is no point. I'm interested in characters who grapple with all this. Lillian Boxfish is based on Margaret Fishback, once the highest-paid female advertising copywriters in the world, very famous in her day, and now nobody's heard of her unless they've read my novel. But for my students, it’s less fame and more about recognition or appreciation. Very few of my students want true fame. Most people, when they think for five minutes about fame, realize it's a horrific trap. It's almost like a disease that you can never be rid of—not being able to leave your house because a bunch of people would bother you and you would have to be gracious to them. It just sounds so exhausting. So I don't think they want fame. But I do think they want recognition, they want connection, they want a sense that they're not just singing into their hairbrush in the mirror, looking into their own eyes. They want to look into other people's eyes.
TFR: From Dust to Stardust chronicles a movie star as the pictures become talkies. It’s a very 20th-century life. It couldn’t have been a 19th-century life and it it cannot be a 21st-century life. Because you're interested in the conundrum of characters trying to do the right thing, do you ever find that the right thing in those historical moments is very different than what we would feel the right thing?
KR: Yeah, and I love thinking about presentism, which of course is an idea that many people are caught up in without knowing it. They have this linear, unbroken idea of historical progress and social progress, in which we started in the dim dark ages where we had wrong ideas about gender, about race, about colonialism, about everything—about consciousness itself. And now, because we are in the present moment, we've nailed it. We've got it right. So, the correct way to feel is how we feel. We are the correct ones. I think that's so funny. Intellectual humility is important, and I think a lot of people don't have it, and I remind myself to have it all the time. We can't see what we can't see, we can’t know what we can't know. And so I love writing historical stuff, It's fun to think about other ways to have felt oneself to be correct.
TFR: We love Surrealism at The Fortnightly Review, and wanted to ask you about Rene Magritte, whose Selected Writings you edited.
KR: I saw a Magritte show at the Art Institute of Chicago and the texts on the placards were so good I wanted to buy the book. It turns out Magritte himself wrote the text the museum used, but the writing had never been collected into a book. They were kind of a lost text that was supposed to come out with RiverRun Press in the UK in the early 1980s. A lot of the texts were like little essays, almost like manifestos and polemics. Some were like actual little detective stories: Magritte initially thought he was going to be a writer. That's what he wanted to do when he was young and reading serialized mysteries and adventure stories. I always say he’s a writer’s painter. And Magritte? I don’t think he would be offended by that.
TFR: What can you tell us about Rose Metal Press?
KR: I started that little press in 2006 with my friend Abby Beckel, whom I met when I was in graduate school at Emerson. I don’t want to give us too much credit, but I think we’ve contributed to making hybrid genres a little more acceptable, normalizing them for people. What we vowed was that we would never publish ourselves (though there's no shame in being self-published). We knew that we wanted to publish people who were previously unknown to us, because I want to connect. I like community and to meet new people who are doing something we'd be into. And we can help them by putting their work out and working to find them an audience they might not otherwise find. We didn't want to start in a nepotistic way, publishing ourselves or people we already knew. We wanted to just meet the randos. We do it for the mystery.
4 Poems by Kathleen Rooney
CINQUAIN FOR THAT FEEL WHEN YOU HEAR THAT CHAINSMOKERS SONG ABOUT
your room- mate back in Boul- der when you’re in Delhi for the first time, jetlagged out of your mind.
CINQUAIN FOR WHEN WE WERE WALKING THROUGH THE HILLS AND SANJANA POINTED OUT HOW THE NATIVE CEDARS WERE BEING CROWDED OUT IN FAVOR OF PINES
planted for turpentine: “Human greed has become a king that has changed the way peo- ple live.
CINQUAIN FOR WATCHING DANIELLE ZIPLINE DOWN THE MOUNTAIN AT THE SHIVA TEMPLE IN NAINITAL AND THINKING HOW IT’S UP TO EVERYBODY TO FUCK AROUND AND FIND OUT
the mean- ing (or maybe meanings) of life for them- selves. No one else can tell you what they are.
CINQUAIN FOR HOW THE CROWDING IN URBAN INDIA MADE ME THINK OF DOSTOEVSKY SUPPOSEDLY SAYING THAT MAN IS AN ANIMAL WHO CAN GET USED TO ANYTHING, EVERYONE BEING
Pushed in- to the city— a balloon that expands forever and ever and ne- ver pops.
