Kit Reed on Enclave

Called "One of our brightest cultural commentators" by Publishers Weekly, Kit Reed has a new novel out called Enclave. Others include Thinner Than Thou, which won an ALA Alex award. Often anthologized, her short stories appear in venues ranging from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov's SF and Omni to The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review and The Norton Anthology of American Literature. A Guggenheim fellow and the first American recipient of a five-year literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation, she is Resident Writer at Wesleyan University. Recently, she took time out from her busy schedule to talk to me about Enclave.

Amazon.com: Enclave has a cast of thousands, ranging from Marines and monks and a disgraced physician's assistant to the next generation of brat-packers and misfits, including a transgendered boy and two MMORPG addicts, one a foul-mouthed twelve-year-old who accidentally killed a guy and the other an epileptic prince. Then there's also the mysterious intruder. You've locked them all up in a Benedictine monastery turned into a high-end boarding school on an island mountaintop. Where does all this come from?

Kit Reed: All from my life, where, I guess, nothing I see is wasted. I was a military kid, which meant we moved a lot. I was in fourth grade in four different schools, and when you move all the time it makes you hyper-observant. You have to be, to find your way home from places, and to fit in at whichever school. You have to talk the talk and walk the walk and wear the right thing or the local kids will destroy you, and it makes you hyper-observant. I have trans friends, epileptic friends, geek friends in quantity. So it all comes from that, I suppose. Well, that and the dream, about which more later.

What else. I lived on military bases and did time in a convent boarding school, with bells for waking up, going to bed, lights out, all that, just like trumpets playing Reveille, Tattoo and Taps on military bases. I found out cloisters and bases are run in a lot of the same ways. Everything done in a certain way at a given time. Every day. It's all about the discipline, and that you can depend on the system is what keeps the operation going. If the system breaks down, as it does when plague surfaces in Sarge Whitemore's ideal Academy, everything's up for grabs.

               

Amazon.com: Now, about the dream...

Kit Reed: I actually did dream the heart of this novel. My dreams play like movies, and in this one I was at a computer in this gray stone Gothic heap which had to be a boarding school. I was going nuts because the machine in front of me had gone bananas--some kind computer virus was taking down the entire school network and I, and I alone was supposed to fix it. At the same time in the movie I was dreaming, I could see the school infirmary, where kids were getting sick by the dozens and nobody knew what to do for them--except me. The sense of responsibility was tremendous. If I couldn't cure the virus that infected the computer network, the plague would kill every kid in the infirmary. So maybe I wrote Enclave to cure those kids in that dream.

Amazon.com: How did you find out that you were a writer? That wasn't in a dream, was it?

Kit Reed: I was doing it before I could read, dictating a "novel" to my mother when I was five; as soon as I could print I took over. I never looked back and I never stopped. I can't stop, and I don't know if that's a Good Thing or a Bad Thing. It's just who I am.

Amazon.com: How did that go?

Kit Reed: About like you'd expect. A lot of rejections along the way, some good moments and some bummers, but always continuity. My first jobs were at two middle-sized city dailies, the St. Pete Times and then the New Haven Register back when it was a real paper. I taught myself to write short stories by trying to write science fiction. It was a way to try and fail and fall on my ass and try again without using up any of my central material: the childhood, everything that followed. I started getting handwritten notes from SF editors. My favorite came from H.L. Gold; I'd attached a note: "Dear Mr. Gold. How does this grab you?" It came back with: "Right down the throat and by the lunch." My second favorite was from my then-agent, about my most-anthologized story, "Winter." She wrote: "If you can sell this, I will pin a medal on you." It's in The Norton Anthology and described as "an example of the mastery of the form" in The New York Times Book Review.

Amazon.com: You've been called, among other things, a writer of serious psychological fiction, a writer of speculative fiction and, by Publishers Weekly, "one of our smartest cultural commentators. How would you characterize what you do?

Kit Reed: I guess I'd call me "trans-genred." The novels divide pretty cleanly between mainstream and SF, and as Kit Craig I had a run of psychological thrillers. My stories turn up in The Yale Review from time to time, and there's one in the winter issue of The Kenyon Review, out right now; Asimov's SF has one scheduled for fall and there'll be another in Kenyon too. I guess that puts me pretty firmly in the slipstream.

Amazon.com: Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Kit Reed: Both. I never get bored. But, marketing and sales like to be able to package you like Wheaties, on the principle that people buying books expect more of the same from you, so there's that. My first agent complained that, "The trouble with you is that you're very independent." Um. A... Chinese curse? Self-fulfilling prophecy?"

Amazon.com: In its starred review, Publishers Weekly describes Enclave as a "gripping dystopian satire." Do you think of yourself as a satirist?

Kit Reed: I don't know. I wasn't laughing when I wrote it. I'm from the "laugh or go mad" school of thought, i.e. you can just get through whatever it is, if you can find something to laugh at. Catch-22 is my idea of a perfect novel. On the other hand, I can be dead serious about what I'm doing and turn out to be more like the actor playing Hamlet tramping around stage with one foot in a trash can. Everybody in Enclave believes terrifically in what they're doing and they care terrifically. I do too. If that makes it satire, OK.

Amazon.com: What are you working on now?

Kit Reed: I seem to be deep in the middle of a run of short stories...I suppose you could say I'm working hard, having fun and as we speak, listening for the next novel.