Last week, the MacArthur Foundation announced its 2013 Fellows. Karen Russell, a longtime contributor to The New Yorker, is among them. I spoke with her over e-mail.
How might the MacArthur change what you work on, or how you work on it?
You know, the MacArthur Web site defines the award as a “speculative prize.” I liked reading that, since to me it really did feel like these strangers from outer space calling to tell me that I had just been granted years of horizon light—the space and the time to dream in new directions. That said, I also feel unequal, right now, to answering your totally reasonable question. At the moment, I’m still a little bit in shock. There’s a line from a terrific Joy Williams story that goes, “Your life’s not assimilating your days and that’s not good, Dennis.” I think my body is still struggling to assimilate this very surprising, very wonderful event. In the immediate future, I’d like to return to researching a second novel. And to finish this weird short story that I’ve been working on.
You’re thirty-two. Is there any part of you that wishes you could receive this award later in life—like you’ve used up your lifetime bolt of luck lightning?
Way to go, Willing. How am I supposed to lie about my age now? According to this Gables student I.D. from 1998, I’m still sixteen.
So much about this ride has surprised me. I think I believed that I had exhausted all my luck lightning on the day that you guys took my first story. I mean, I was ready to throw down the dry ice and lie down in my coffin then. I thought, That’s it! Actually, for me, the timing of the award is extraordinary—I think it’s going to allow me to have a stable home for a few years, and concentrate most of my energies on writing. I’m so grateful. That said, of course a part of me always thinks the ship is going down. My dad, a wonderfully kind, supportive, and hilarious person who also happens to be King Doomsday, congratulated me and then said, of life generally, “The ascent is short, but the descent is very, very long.” I don’t even think that’s such a bad attitude to take.
You’re that rare thing: a fantastical literary writer with some popular success. How much does the MacArthur validate what you might call your project?
Whenever I see the word “popular,” I think of that Nada Surf song. That song was popular, and where are those guys now?
In all seriousness, I can’t overstate how terrific it is to feel that the Foundation thinks this kind of work has value. Every day, I am mystified and grateful that my books have found any readers whatsoever, given that they feature alligator-wrestlers, wolf-girls, and ghosts. I take that monstrous crew seriously, of course, and really labor to use elements of the fantastic to explore some of the terrors and fantasies that govern our lives, and that have shaped our history and our interactions with our families and our environments, but I do find that I blush when telling polite strangers my own book titles. Not infrequently, people assume that I am either a children’s author or the author of monster erotica (never both at once, though, at least so far … although when this grant runs out, maybe that’s a plan). So I cannot overstate how much this award means to me. It is tremendously validating, to be part of a class that includes Donald Antrim, whose sentences could hang in museums, and these other freakishly gifted people.
I think that if and when I do assimilate this, and come to truly accept that it’s not all some Japanese reality TV show hoax, this vote of confidence is going to pay some real psychological dividends. To me, it feels like the MacArthur Foundation stamped my passport book so that I can make these Twilight Zone sojourns. It’s really a gift.
Photograph: Courtesy of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.