“Swimming for Shore” by Chrissy Kolaya appeared in Issue 34 and can be read here.
We’d love to hear more about this story.
First of all, thank you so much for including this piece here in Sequestrum. It was first published back in 2004 in Crazyhorse, then in their 50th Anniversary Best Of Crazyhorse issue, and later in Norton’s New Sudden Fiction anthology, so I’ve been very lucky that this story has made its way to so many readers.
Like almost any piece of creative work, though, it began with a lot of rejection! I teach in the creative writing MFA program at the University of Central Florida, and I thought that the story of this piece’s journey to publication might be a useful illustration for our students of the patience and tenacity one needs in this field, so I put together a timeline to share with my students that lays out the process and journey of writing, revising, and submitting this piece. Even though it went on to be my most well-published story so far, it still racked up a pretty impressive list of rejections along the way!
One of the other cool things that’s grown out of this piece is that a few year ago, a filmmaker who first read the piece in New Sudden Fiction contacted me wanting to make a short film based on it. The filmmaker, Gabriel Connelly, was fantastic to work with. As a pathologically curious person, I found it fascinating to talk with him throughout the process and to learn a bit about the way filmmakers work and think about a piece from screenplay to treatment to scoring a piece, and everything else along the way. Of course, I’m biased, but it’s a gorgeous film, and I’m so happy to know that this new piece of art grew from the seed of this story! If you’re interested, you can check it out here: http://chrissykolaya.com/swimming-for-shore-film/
What was the most difficult part in writing this story?
Pacing and tone were really important for me to get right with this piece, so I spent a long time working on both of those things, reading the piece aloud over and over, tweaking a word or sentence here or there, adding whitespace to slow things down.
When I wrote this, I’d been mainly writing poems for years, and it felt so strange and difficult to write “long”—ironic to think of now, as it’s actually a relatively short piece! I remember needing to trick myself into writing this by breaking the story into separate chunks, which is where the form came from—the list of questions that the narrator evades before finally telling us what happened.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
Currently, I’m especially excited about two new books of poetry: Laurie Uttich’s Somewhere A Woman Lowers the Hem of Her Skirt and Rochelle Hurt’s The J Girls: A Reality Show: both collections of bad-ass feminist poems by two of my favorite people, colleagues, and writers.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Right now, Jennifer Egan or Lauren Groff. I’m so in awe of the work they make. So it would be a very awkward, fan-girl-y drink for sure! Maybe it would be better if I could just silently eavesdrop on them chatting together about craft!
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I’m finishing up revisions on my second novel and looking for an agent to represent it: it’s a weird book about cryptozoology, Victorian naturalists, folklore, colonization, and 19th Century ideas about race and evolution called The Second Voyage of Audley Worthington.
Thanks again for including “Swimming for Shore” in this issue. Happy reading and writing, everyone!
Our thanks to Chrissy for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “Swimming for Shore” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/fiction-swimming-for-shore.
___________________________________
Chrissy Kolaya is a poet and fiction writer, author of Charmed Particles: a novel (Dzanc Books) and two books of poems: Any Anxious Body and Other Possible Lives (Broadstone Books). Her work has appeared in a number of anthologies and literary journals. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida, where she also directs the Writers in the Sun Reading Series. You can learn more about her work at chrissykolaya.com