To put it simply, Kevin Moffett’s fiction moves me. I have laughed aloud while reading his stories (“Ursa, On Zoo Property and Off”) and, at other times, felt myself so pained by a character’s struggle (“The Medicine Man”) that afterward I went out for a beer. But ultimately, I returned to these stories, and then returned to them again. The worlds depicted in last year’s debut collection, Permanent Visitors, are bizarre ones, filled with fortune tellers, drifters, and humans dressed as animals. In spite of that absurdity — or perhaps because of it — there is something sharply recognizable in these worlds, something true.
The stories in Permanent Visitors are primarily set in Florida, where I know you also went to undergrad. Can you speak a little bit about your writing education?
Kevin Moffett: I got my BA from the University of Florida in Gainesville, and then took a year off. I moved to Oxford, Mississippi for a year to study with Barry Hannah and work and write, and then I went back to Gainesville. I followed a woman there, and for various reasons realized that wasn’t a good idea. [As an undergraduate] I studied with Padgett Powell, who is one of the best teachers I’ve ever had. I just never tired of hearing him talk about writing — my writing, other people’s writing, the published writing we were reading. I just wanted to keep that. It was familiar, it was comfortable. I went back and it was just not a good situation, so I dropped out.
HMB: How did you get a job writing for The Believer?
KM: I wrote that article for Harper’s, originally. I had a friend who knew an editor there and he knew that I was living in DC, and that I [was writing for Funworld] and was traveling around to the amusement parks and talking to the management there. I was commissioned to go to these four parks and ended up writing this article. Once I turned it into Harper’s, the Iraq War had started and Harper’s had turned into a very politically-centric publication, where they were publishing not the first person reportage. They were publishing much more polemical sorts of things. They weren’t interested in it at all, so I was desperately scrambling around for someone to publish it, and The Believer was good enough to run it.
HMB: Everybody seems to have an opinion about what MFA programs do for writers, as far as stunting or encouraging their creativity and craft. Having been through an MFA program yourself, what are your thoughts?
KM: Well, I can give both sides of it. When I went for a year at Florida I was twenty-four I had been out of undergraduate for a year. I vaguely knew that I would like to write stories for a living, but had I no idea of the commitment involved — the commitment to write, the commitment to kind of plot your life in a way that would make that writing possible. Just the hard work, the disappointment, all that stuff that’s involved in making that sort of leap. When I went to Iowa I was older; I was thirty. I had a family, a wife and a child, and I was going there with the direct intention of getting some work done. One of the reasons it was so appealing was because it’s a program in which you can take as many classes — as many lit classes, as many craft workshops — as you want. You can just take workshops, and get your book done. There are no grades. And there are aesthetics there. Other students are pushing their aesthetic on whatever story they read in a workshop. But I think when you’re a little bit older, when you’re a little bit more confidant in what you’re doing, it’s not as torturous, it’s not as difficult to listen to. It was a really good experience for me the second go-round — I had a lot of time, I had health insurance.
HMB: Were “torturous” workshops something you experienced in Florida?
KM: Oh, yeah. I mean, I think everywhere it’s that way. It’s a really complicated dynamic, you know, because half of it is already knowing what’s flawed in a story and kind of sitting there like a ghost at your own funeral and hearing it but not being able to say, “I know, I know!” The best stories resist summary, synopsis, somebody summing them up, and they resist summary conclusions about them, I think, or someone saying, “Well, this, this, and this need to be fixed, this, this, and this is right.” So, it is sort of torturous. To hear anybody talk about your work out loud is sick in a lot of ways [laughs]. Even if [a criticism] is glowing, it’s still nauseating in a lot of ways.
HMB: Is outside criticism something you seek now that you’re not in a workshop anymore?
KM: I have the luxury of having a wife who also writes short fiction, so I have my first and best reader here at the house. I show her everything. Even before I’ve made an assessment of it, I show it to her. Not very far past her. I usually show it to her and then to an editor.
HMB: The editing process is a big help in breaking up the story, in complicating it for yourself. Breaking out of rhetorical patterns, too.
KM: Yes, I think the editing process is a big help in that way. I’ve written a lot of first drafts that seem infected by what I’m reading, or that are of a certain mold. Like, I’m writing a story that I would write, you know? Writing a story like the last three I’ve written. So I think the editing process, and the revision process, is a big help in breaking up the story, in complicating it for yourself. Breaking out of rhetorical patterns, too.
HMB: Is the humor in your stories something that you strive for, or does it come out more naturally?
KM: That’s one of the things I am drawn to as a reader — the way certain writers are able to have this sort of uncomfortable, awkward, embarrassing, but in some ways funny moments, combined with natural elements of suspense and all those things. Plus I was writing about Florida most of the time for the stories in the collection, and to deny the grotesque and the absurd and the funny would be to deny a huge part of the kind of Florida that I felt I was writing about. Humor didn’t come naturally to me necessarily in the writing, because I think writing funny and being funny are often much farther apart than people think. But once I was able to start doing it, it felt right. Nothing came naturally to me as a writer. Nothing. Describing characters, setting scenes, making people walk in and out of rooms, having things happen — nothing came naturally. I was a really slow learner.
HMB: Are you somebody who writes every single day?
KM: I used to be. A lot of the stories in the collection were written when I was writing every single day. I don’t have that luxury anymore. I’m teaching now, and during the semester I write about four days a week. Which doesn’t mean I don’t feel insanely guilty and awful on the days I’m not able to write. I wish I could write every single day. I used to have this thought that I should just keep myself in the chair, even if it’s like squeezing blood from a stone. I thought I should just stay in the chair. But another part of me thinks if it’s not working, it’s not working. I admire that work ethic, but it’s not always tenable. Sometimes it’s like, “Would I rather be hanging out with my four year old son and making hand puppets, or writing for two hours?” Squeeze in three hours here, four hours there, or whenever you can, but there’s life too.
HMB: Once a story is published, do you find yourself at all self-conscious about it, or concerned that there is something in it that you don’t want everyone to see?
KM: There’s one story in the collection that just shouldn’t be there. I don’t want to tell you which story it is, but I tried to bury it in the upper middle of the collection so people would maybe forget to read it or not get to it or something. But pretty much once I’ve sent a story out, I’m okay with it. I think every writer looks at a story and see where they might not have executed it to its conception, but whole stories I’m usually okay with putting out there.
HMB: Do you have any all time favorite writers or short stories?
KM: I’m teaching an intro to fiction workshop and I always read “A Good Man is Hard to Find” along with the students. Saying that is one of your favorite stories is like saying “Hey Jude” is your favorite song, though. There isn’t much risk in saying that. But really, I must have read that story about two dozen times. It’s so tight — there’s not a wasted description, not a wasted bit of dialogue. It’s just motoring toward the end. It’s the first story I’ve read that actually scared me. It seems unerringly human and real, but yet not. That was one of the first stories I read that just jarred me. It’s really a disconcerting story. I’m a huge Donald Barthelme fan. William Trevor. Leonard Michaels is someone I like a lot. And of course Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner and Isaac Babel.
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Kevin Moffett's unique writing style and ability to embrace the absurd has captivated audiences and established him as a rising star in the literary world. Through his stories, he explores strange and recognizable worlds, filled with quirky characters and hilarious situations. His writing education and experiences with workshops have shaped his approach to storytelling, and he continues to hone his craft through the editing process. Moffett's stories are a testament to the power of humor in literature and the importance of finding one's own voice. Whether writing every day or squeezing in time between other responsibilities, Moffett has shown a commitment to his art. As he continues to write and publish, he remains self-aware and open to growth, always striving to create stories that resonate with readers.