Page 8
News
‘It is a lot of
people’s story'
Street Roots • March 6-12, 2015
n
News
Street Roots • March 6-12, 2015
i
In h er debut novel, Northwest au th or M egan K ru se
explores fam ily a n d queerness from three perspectives
BY SUE ZALOKAR
For me, I loved the work, but I just
became overwhelmed with it. I remember
driving through the city after having gone
egan Kruse came of age as a queer
home to my regular life and being overly
youth in quasi-rural Washington -
aware of all of these people surrounding me
outside of Tulalip to be exact. And
like many youths, she gravitated toward and in crisis. I wasn’t able to draw those
lines very clearly.
Portland. Between college and grad school,
But, I left and I went to grad school and I
Kruse moved here mainly for the queer
knew that what I’d always wanted to do was
community. She worked for three years in
write.
domestic violence intervention — an
It has always been easier for me
experience that she says
to
think to myself, I’m going to
became a pivotal part of her
write about this. And to me, that
life.
has always been a way to make
Kruse calls Seattle home
sense of things emotionally. It let
these days, teaching at the
me let myself off the hook a little
community writing center
bit.
And it let me share those
Hugo House and mentoring
things and make them visible, in
and teaching online — a joy
the way I know how: to write.
and a staple that feeds her
STAFF WRITER
s» » a aiBgii
M
passion for writing.
S.Z. For readers who may not
Her creative writing has
know your work, what are you all
appeared in a number of
about?
literary magazines and
Call Me Home
journals, including Narrative
M.K. I want to represent
by Megan Kruse
Magazine, Witness and The
contemporary characters that
Sun.
aren’t generally represented. I’m a
Kruse’s first published
traditionalist in the sense that I like a story
novel, “Call Me Home,” was published by
that contains you.
Hawthorne Books, an independent press in
That kind of story-telling has often
Portland. At its heart, this is a story about
involved rural places and a lot of
family, our choices and how we come to live
description, and it hasn’t encompassed
with them, what it means to be queer in the
many queer characters. There is no
rural West, and the changing idea of home.
Many of the themes in her new book involve narrative for characters who live in places
where there is not a queer community or a
domestic violence and came out of the time
queer culture. There is no template for
that she was working in domestic violence
them about what it’s like to grow up.
intervention, trying to figure out how to
That is part of why I want to tell those
make emotional sense out of everything she
stories.
It is my story; it is a lot of people’s
saw.
story. There is a certain kind of loneliness
Kruse returns to Portland this month to
when you grow up out of the urban area
give a reading at Powell’s City of Books — a
environment because you KNOW you are
dream, she says.
going to leave home. You know you can’t
“It’s really exciting - this whole process -
I never really want to outgrow of this feeling stay there because you don’t really exist
there.
of gratefulness,” she says.
Her reading at Powell’s will be at 7:30
p.m. Tuesday, March 10.
Sue Zalokar: What was your takeaway
from that time in Portland and the work you
did here in domestic violence?
Megan Kruse: I did love that work, but I
also know that there are ways those people,
who are able to do it for a long time, they
make it sustainable for themselves. Either
they figure out how to create those
necessary boundaries or to balance that
with the rest of their life. For a lot of
people, if that is your singular passion, (that
passion) gives you a lot of longevity.
S.Z. Your novel, “Call Me Home, ” is told in
three voices: Lydia, Jackson and Amy: The
sum of their voices seems to be more powerful
than one of their voices would be on its own.
M.K. I have always been captivated by
the idea of how families function in the
world. The story of a family looks one way
from the outside, but it is going to look
different from each individual person. The
sum of that creates a more powerful story
than any one person could provide.
“Call Me Home” began as Jackson’s story.
It was his disenfranchisement and his
leaving home and making his way in a new
to be queer in the West.” I have a friend
who pointed out that it is reductive to the
story (to declare it as a queer story).
It’s like anything else. You have to have
visibility before something becomes fully
accepted.
It can sound reductive to say, “Oh, Kate
Brown, this bisexual woman ...” Well, the
point is that she is the governor, and these
are the things that she stands for.
It is important to disrupt the sense that
straight is normality, and that people in
power are not minorities. I think it is
important to own those things.
It is important for me to say that my
novel is a queer novel. Does that mean
that is all it is? No.
We are a ways off from queer stories
being just as accessible as (non-queer
stories). Until then, until it’s not odd, until
someone is not going to pick up my book
and be like, “Oh, wait,” then yes we need
to (verbalize and recognize minorities and
their accomplishments).
S.Z. I worked in a tribal school in
Washington state where the staff was largely
non-native, but I always liked that we had a
native principal. He was a walking, talking
role model in front of a lot of native kids in
much the same way that acknowledging Gov.
Brown’s sexuality, or your novel’s sexuality
for that matter, sets role models for LGBTQ
youths. “Hey! There are gay writers and
politicians. I could do that....”
M.K. I remember being young and a
teenager and how veraciously I would eat
up any literature or media that had to do
with lesbianism or queerness. People say,
“Oh, do you need to name something this
way?” That’s a secondary concern to me.
That is a question of rhetoric. When the
real question is about getting queer stories
out there. That is what is important right •
now - having somebody pick up a book
that looks like it is about them.
P H O T O B Y D A V ID L A T T IM E R
Author Megan Kruse will read from her novel, “Call Me Home, ” on Tuesday, March 10, at Powell’s City of Books.
community in Idaho, where he is working
on a construction crew. He had left his
mother and sister and there was sort of a
refrain for them. That was the thing that
kept kind of pulling him forward was this
desire to find them again.
I started to realize that the story was
empty without hearing their side of the
story. I didn’t have any establishment for
whether or not they were missing him too
or what had happened to them. It occurred
to me that the story was not just his; it was
theirs as well.
If I could tell all three voices, then the
sum would become more than each of the
parts together. I revisited a lot of events
from different perspectives. My hope is that
it starts to overlap to create this sort of
more intense understanding of this family’s
story. •
S.Z. Is Jackson modeled after you in any
way? You are a queer woman who once was a
queer youth in rural Washington...
M.K. Maybe in some ways emotionally.
He’s very introspective and sensitive. His
story isn’t mine, but in a lot of ways, despite
making some mistakes, he is very self-
aware. And he is able to take some big, bold
risks ... he goes about that very
calculatingly.
going to be a smooth transition, without
access to many resources ... (is slim).
The struggle to be out is so
complicated. We owe it to those stories to
recognize that there is still a lot of work
left to do.
S.Z. The Center for American Progress
reports that 20 percent to 40 percent of
homeless youths are LGBTQ.
S.Z. We have a new governor in Oregon
as of the week of this interview. Many of the
headlines make sure that the public knows
that Gov. Kate Brown is openly bisexual. Is
this important?
M.K. Disproportionately, this affects
people. Young people leave their homes and
come to Portland or San Francisco or
Seattle or other metropolitan areas where
they can be open and queer.
We tend to think, “OK, once you leave
home, you can go out into the world and
make this life,” and the reality is that people
are starting off disenfranchised. We kind of
spackle over the issue.
If you leave home without any resources
and you leave home because there is no
place for you there, the chances that that is
M.K. I think so. When I give my novel
to someone to read, there is copy on the
back: “This is a story about what it means
S.Z. In introducing your manuscript to
Elizabeth Gilbert (“Eat Pray Love”), who
wrote the foreword to the book, she says you
wrote: “And so I think that in some ways the
novel became a love letter and an apology.
An acknowledgement that I am inextricably
a part of where I came from, and that you
can’t actually weigh what is precious or ugly;
it is itself, and so are we.”
What does this mean to you?
M.K. When I was growing up, I had a
real, desperate sense of wanting to escape
where I was from. I did not value that
place. It is this ragged corner of the
Northwest where I just remember this
constant onslaught of rain and kind of
rough places and rough people, and I was
sort of “small town girl with big dreams”
where I wanted to go out where I thought
things were happening. Some of that, in
my mind, was related to this feeling that
there wasn’t going to be a community for
Page 9
me there.
Writing (“Call Me Home”) made me
realize that these (same places) are the
ones that have made me.
There is no way to quantify how much
it’s worth to be from somewhere; you have
to look at the experiences. The same with
thinking about those novels that I wrote
before ... I used to think they were so
terrible. But then being able to embrace
from whence you came and realize that
you can’t definitively name those things as
good and bad and you can’t ever leave
behind the places that you are from or the
things that have shaped you into who you
are.
"The struggle to he out is so com plicated.
We ©we it to those stories to recognize
that there is s till a lo t of w ork le ft to d o ."
S.Z. How much of fiction writing is
nonfiction?
M.K. Nearly every part of this book
came from ... so many small details and
moments .... Everything comes from who
you are.
There are vistas (of my life) or
approximations of people I have met; they
live inside the fictional story in “Call Me
Home.”
Jackson and Lydia’s relationship is
similar to my and my brother’s. Their
relationship to the geography. Those
pieces all come from me.
It happens in both respects, if you look
at nonfiction, there are so many ways that
we sort of “tailor” or transmute our
nonfiction to have fictional qualities to
make it easier to connect to.
Fiction has always countered that fear
of smallness.
S.Z. Have you any advice for aspiring
writers?
M.K. Something I say to students lately,
but generally, is recognizing that writing is
not a destination you arrive at.
I can’t imagine a world in which I
wouldn’t also have to work full time. You
just have to remind yourself that this is
something that you will continue to do and
make room for it in your life, because once
you let down those ideas of how it’s going
to be when you “get there,” you allow your
writing to get better and better.
Just pursuing everything that you are
interested in or you find important and
keep writing about them, putting those
ideas on the page. You will get better over
time.