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Q&A: ‘Sinkhole’ author Leyna Krow talks fictionalizing Spokane, wrestling climate change, reader secrets and more ahead of Tuesday book release

By Megan Dhein For The Spokesman-Review

Leyna Krow’s newest short story collection, “Sinkhole and Other Inexplicable Voids” delivers on the fabulist elements fans of Krow’s have come to expect from her writing – an octopus love story originally published in The Spokesman-Review’s 2022 Summer Stories, a baby’s twin appearing out of nowhere, a sinkhole that improves everything tossed into it – while exploring complicated family dynamics and climate change anxiety. Instead of looking to Spokane’s past, as she did in her debut novel, “Fire Season,” “Sinkhole” is a return to the “fiction-science” (a term coined by Spokane author Sharma Shields for Krow’s writing specifically) of her first short story collection, “I’m Fine, But You Appear to be Sinking.”

On Feb. 4, Northwest Passages will host Krow at the Chronicle Pavilion, where she’ll be in conversation with Spokesman-Review reporter Alexandra Duggan.

On Jan. 15, Krow spoke on the phone about fictionalizing Spokane, wrestling with climate change as a parent, letting her readers in on secrets, having her writing optioned for Hollywood and more. This interview has been edited for length, language and clarity.

Megan Dhein: There is a family in “Sinkhole” that receives six stories, and I wanted to ask you when you started thinking about this family, and if there was a point when you considered publishing more of them, like a novel in short stories, or if you always knew that their story would be contained to those six stories.

Leyna Krow: Their point of origin is the first story in the collection, “The Twin.” I had written this as a standalone piece and I had submitted the full book manuscript to my publisher. This was maybe two years ago at this point. It was about half of the book that it is now, and has some other stuff in it that’s since been taken out.

(My editor’s) concern was that there wasn’t enough thematic connection between the stories. And she was like, “A lot of these stories are doing similar things, what if they were linked to one another?” And I was like, “I think that’s interesting.” I don’t feel like I could artificially link the stories that were already there, but I really liked that family from “The Twin.” I really liked that story and I was like, “I think I could write more about these people.” So, I went from there and wrote those additional stories, and rebuilt the collection around them.

In hindsight, I do think that if I had had more time, maybe I could have done an entire book of them and really call it a novel in stories, but I don’t know at this point what else I would add. I did write those stories fairly quickly, to shore up this collection and to give it more structure. I’m not sure what else would be in the book at this point, but I do think about them sometimes and I’m like, “Oh, I wonder what else it could be.”

Dhein: One thing that your writing likes to do in this collection, but certainly in (“Fire Season”) and in your first collection, (“I’m Fine, But You Appear to be Sinking”) is give its characters secrets. Sometimes the secrets have fabulist elements and sometimes family lore. I was hoping you could talk about the power of secrets in your fiction.

Krow: Yes, that’s such a good question, because it is one of my favorite devices. I love secrets as a reader. I think that almost sometimes the less important they are, the better. My characters are oftentimes keeping secrets, and sometimes they’re secrets that only matter to the character themselves, and sometimes they’re tremendous secrets that would matter to a lot of people in their lives. (When) there’s an unreliable narrator or a narrator who’s doing a lot of withholding, that’s a technique that writers can use to keep readers engaged, but I’ve never felt that as compelling as letting readers in on a secret that the character is keeping from somebody else in the book because that way the reader feels like, “Oh, I’m in on it.” There are a bunch of people who are holding onto stuff in this book, and for the most part, you as a reader you get to know what it is, but other people don’t.

Dhein: In the short story “Outburst” you describe a lahar. “Lava might seem like the scariest thing about a volcano. But if the mountain is covered in ice and snow, which liquify upon eruption, then the scariest part is mud. Lava is a slow-moving force, and does not travel far. Mud is nearly boundless in comparison. It churns up sediment, dislodging boulders and trees and anything else in its path. A fast-moving river of cement. That’s a lahar.”I want to speak with you about the lahar, and Little Seattle. You imagine a future where Spokane became a place where displaced people from a climate disaster ended up creating their own community within a community. Can you talk about the origin of the idea and what your research process was like in building that climate event?

Krow: That story was one of the more challenging things that I’ve ever written because it was a real departure from other things where I’ve made up scientific facts in the past. So, the book has a lot of low-key climate change anxiety to it. But then I wanted there to be this one big thing that seemed very, very horrible that we could ultimately hang our hat on in terms of climate disaster. I also wanted to write about a disaster that I didn’t feel like I’d read about a bunch of times before.

I set out to make something up, and the lahar in “Outburst” is a combination of two different disasters, and it will not play out on Mount Rainier in the way that it’s described. That’s not a real thing.

A lahar is a real thing and it will happen to Mount Rainier, if the volcano erupts. And people who live in the shadow of Rainier actually, if you drive around … you’ll see evacuation route signs and that’s because if this massive mud flow occurs, those communities could be inundated.

But it won’t happen because of the glaciers melting on their own. But that is a phenomenon that occurs in other places, particularly in the Himalayas and the Andes where glacial lakes will form when it gets warm enough, and then if it gets too warm, those lakes burst open, and that’s outburst flooding. So I took two different disasters and married them together because I wanted to write about something that I didn’t think people had seen before. So, if that actually makes you feel a little bit better …

Dhein: It makes me feel a little better …

Krow: And outburst does happen on smaller scales, and it has happened on Mount Rainier in small scales, where there’ll be these mudslides, but it’s not going to displace 100,000 people. I did want it to feel like something that could happen. So I did do quite a bit of research and I called glaciologists. I spoke to somebody at the University of Portland and somebody at Western Washington University, somebody at a school on the East Coast, and they were kind enough to explain to me what outburst flooding is and how it happens on glaciers and what actually is happening to mountain glaciers as they recede due to warming temperatures. Initially, I had this wealth of information that I was like, “Now I want to put it all in the story,” and that story, which is a long story even now, was 15 pages longer in its first draft. My editor very patiently helped me cut that down into what I think is now a manageable but still pretty scientifically dense piece.

The stories with the Fenster family, I wanted them to be impacted by the disaster but remote from it the way we so often are. Right now, Los Angeles is on fire and we’re a very fire-prone place but, watching this from a distance and you feel the anxiety of it without being personally impacted, unless you have a family in the region. I wanted that feeling for the folks who are ultimately the protagonists of these stories. What is it when you’re not in the line of the disaster, but you stand on the outside in a place that’s impacted in other ways?

Dhein: I want to talk to you about the climate anxiety that runs through your book, but I also wanna speak specifically about – I know you’re a mom, I’m a mom – (how) one of the characters gets into a dispute with her brother about (having a child). She’s wrestling with her decision. Can you talk to me about how it feels to ask those questions in your book?

Krow: I’m a mom of two young kids, and I never questioned whether or not it was ethical to have kids. I do know people now who are just a decade younger than us are wrestling with that decision, and I wonder if it’s something that … will my own kids wrestle with that? (“RIP Kittitas Bong Squad”) is set just 15 years from now. It seemed like a good way to enter into that conversation of where does heightening anxiety lead us to. So many of these stories did come out of my own climate anxiety and the question of what is the world gonna look like for my kids. How do you protect your kids if you don’t know what’s coming or what to do? I was really influenced by Jenny Offill’s novel “Weather,” which I feel like has a lot of similar themes of this pressing anxiety without anything in particular that those characters are at risk of. It’s the same thing for the Fensters. They stand outside of the disaster, but they’re just forced to reckon with it constantly.

Dhein: In your Rumpus interview about “Fire Season,” you said, “I wasn’t writing a climate change novel, but there was this impulse that maybe I should be, maybe we all should be, maybe we should all just stop writing and just fight climate change.” You wrote a climate change collection. Where are you on this now?

Krow: I do have this feeling from time to time of, “Wait, guys, how are we just going on with our lives, shouldn’t we all stop and do something?” I do feel like this collection was a response to that question, and to my own total inability to think of what I could do. That’s the position that some of these characters are in. It’s like, well, you want it not to be this way, but what do you as an individual do? One of the characters, Jace, does upend his entire life to try to fight climate change and it’s not clear what he’s actually doing, and then everybody else is left to grapple with, are we good people? Is it OK to just live our lives? And I guess that’s a question that I feel personally, for sure. But what I’ve settled on is that yeah, it’s OK to live my life because I don’t know what else to do.

Dhein: You said that “I’m Fine, But You Appear to be Sinking” is fiction science. “Fire Season” is fiction history. What’s “Sinkhole”?

Krow: “Sinkhole” is absolutely a return to fiction science. That term for my work was lovingly given to me by Sharma Shields, and I use it all the time and it’s definitely true here where I’ve taken a lot of things that are real in the world or that I could make sound real, and then I’ve manipulated them for fictional purposes.

Dhein: I’ve heard you talk a little bit about how using fabulist elements in your story gives you the confidence to talk about those types of things. Can you talk more about how the fabulism allows you to write to history, allows you to write to science?

Krow: I think that for me, using magical or fabulist elements in a story definitely opens the door for me to be able to talk about things in fiction that it’s either a challenge for me to access or it would be a challenge for readers to access. It just almost provides this safe space where you can say, “Well, this isn’t real.” This is another version of the world. This is something fractured, and then it’s an open door to get at something that is real. I think it winds up allowing readers to be more open to the experience of whatever is going to happen and if whatever happens leads us to someplace where we see something about the actual real world, well then, added benefit.

Dhein: You said on the “I’m a Writer, But” podcast that you’re not usually emotional in writing your work. It’s more of play or entertainment when you’re going through the writing process. Tell me that this is not true about “Appendix: Selected Letters from Grandma Jenna,” because I’m sitting here crying, and then I heard that interview and thought, Leyna wasn’t emotional writing this? How is that possible?

Krow: All right, you caught me there a little bit. I do feel like my starting point when I’m writing is always entertaining myself, first and foremost. I do oftentimes still start with what’s playful, what’s fun. But you’re right, that interview I gave “I’m a Writer, But” was after “Fire Season,” which is a book where the content is much more distant for me than a collection that’s about parenthood and anxiety and climate change. You’re right that this time around I have tapped into things that feel more personal to me. Thinking about that last story, I think that I use Grandma Jenna as a little bit of a conduit – things that I think and want for my own children and I do feel connected to that.

Dhein: Let’s talk about the title story, because it’s had quite a life. “Sinkhole” started in “Lilac City Fairy Tales,” in 2016. Then it went to (literary journal) “Moss,” and an editor over at “Moss” decided to bring this story to Hollywood … and it worked?

Krow: That’s the long and short of it. Alex Davis-Lawrence at “Moss” moved to L.A. and, trying to begin a film career, he had this idea which I still think it’s a cool one – and I don’t know how successful he’s been at it outside of the “Sinkhole” – but of taking writers from the Northwest, particularly folks whose work he published in Moss and trying to sell the film rights. You know, saying like, “Hey, we have, we have all this cool material that’s being produced in the Northwest that nobody is maybe looking at, but that could be great for film and television. Let’s bring it on down to Hollywood.” So he teamed up with another agent and the film rights to “Sinkhole” were optioned by Jordan Peele’s production company, along with Universal, and that happened in 2020. They’ve since renewed that option two more times.

An option just means that they’re holding on to the right temporarily with the intention of making a film. They haven’t purchased the rights, meaning that they are not yet actually making a movie. So, things get optioned all the time. Anytime a studio or production company is like, “Oh, I’m interested in that,” they’ll pay to hold on to the rights for a while, and that’s what’s been happening with “Sinkhole.”

I’ve heard through my film and television agent that there is a script that’s been written, but I don’t know any more than that. So will it ever be a movie? I don’t know, maybe. But it is a cool thing that happened. There’s another story in the collection, “The Sundance Kid Might Have Some Regrets,” there’s also an option for film. Warner Brothers has the option for that one, and similarly, there is a script, the option has been renewed, but I don’t know details beyond that.

Dhein: So, you have two short stories that are options for films right now. How common is this?

Krow: It’s hard to quantify and I don’t actually know the answer. I will say that Hollywood mines material from a lot of places. So, a lot of things get options. It’s actually pretty common for writers who have had stuff published with major publishers to have things optioned. I know Sharma had things optioned. Jess (Walter) has had a ton of things optioned over the years. Hollywood is just sort of always like, “What can we get?” and “Maybe we’ll make it.”

I think what’s unique about “Sinkhole” was that it came out of “Moss,” which was not even a nationally known magazine, it’s really a regional. So, it’s not like I sold a bestseller, and then Hollywood came knocking. It was kind of through the back door, with Alex’s efforts. Then once I’d gotten some attention from the option of “Sinkhole,” that was when I was able to get an agent for “Fire Season.” It was just a little bit backwards is the fun part of that story.

Dhein: Can you talk about your experience first publishing indie and now your last two books with a major press? With Featherproof Books, that was someone you actually went to the MFA program with, right?

Krow: Featherproof was the publisher of my first collection. I connected with them through Jason Sommer. He’s their editor-in-chief now, but at the time, he was really just a volunteer reader for them. He and I had gone to school together at Eastern Washington University, in the MFA program, and we were friends. He read my collection and was like, “I think that Featherproof might be a good home for this.” And so he passed it along to the editors there at the time and kind of in the span of time that they were discussing it, he was moving up through the ranks in the press. Ultimately, he was the one who acquired the book and he was like, “I love it. So, let’s publish it.” Working with him and with that press is fabulous. They’re wonderful. They make beautiful books. They’re based out of Chicago. They’re actually about to publish another EWU grad, TJ Fuller, who lives in Portland. His book is going to come out with them in fall of 2025, I believe. It was really a wonderful experience.

And then, “Fire Season” and now this book, my contract, it was with Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House. And it is a very different experience working with a big publishing house, but in a lot of ways, it’s not that different. Like the person I’m most in contact with is my editor and she’s wonderful and you know, the process of making a book good and readable if it’s done well, looks pretty similar whether you’re with a small publisher or a large one. But then there is this whole big machine that makes the books and sends them out into the world and promotes it. I have a publicist, that’s a different thing for sure. So, It’s been a good change, I think, but I love Featherproof, and I love all the books that they make, and I always encourage when books are looking for a home for a first book, I’m like, well, let me see what my friend Jason is up to, cause they’re so great.

Dhein: What can we expect next from you?

Krow: I’ve got a novel that I’m working on right now, but I’m still in the pretty early stages of it.

Dhein: In interviews with “Fire Season,” you were still a little reticent to call yourself a novelist. Are you starting to think of yourself as a novelist?

Krow: No, still feeling very reticent. I think maybe if this novel I’m working on now works out, then maybe I’ll call myself a novelist. Like two novels seems like maybe you can do it. I did it with “Fire Season,” but now this feels totally different. I don’t know if I learned anything. Challenge, challenging form.

Dhein: There are some people who feel just as terrified about the short story. Can you talk to me about how that form makes it easier for you?

Krow: I think that for me the scope of the short story … it’s shorter but its self-contained nature feels more manageable to me. Novels feel unwieldy, which I think that’s what makes them appealing to some other writers. They’re like, well, you can do so much more in a novel, you don’t have to be so constrained, but I like the constraints of the short form. I think that’s just more comfortably where my brain lives, at least for right now.

Dhein: When you’re writing short stories, whether from “I’m Fine, But You Appear To Be Sinking” or from your most recent collection, when you start writing, do you know the end, or do you write to find out?

Krow: I’d say about 50/50. I think I usually know where a story is generally heading when I start, but not always. Sometimes I’m just playing around and we’ll see where things go. “The Twin” is definitely a story where I was playing around. I just had that, uh, idea of what if you had one baby and all of a sudden another one showed up? What would happen? And so I kind of wrote that. Once I had the premise down, paused for a while and thought about where it was headed. That feels less comfortable to me than thinking a story all the way through before I start to put it on the page.

Dhein: Can you talk to me about how you approach writing about the future?

Krow: Yeah, uh, uncomfortably. It made me really nervous to write about the future. After I wrote “Fire Season,” I kept saying like, “I don’t think I’m gonna write historical fiction again ‘cause I felt burnt out on historical research, but I don’t know if I’ll write about the future again, either.” It’s stressful to try to think about what might happen and have that feel plausible. I spent a long time just thinking about when these stories were actually occurring, how far in the future. I go back and the lahar, maybe that should just be like this year. And then, it’d be like, no, that level of disaster we won’t see for 30, 40, 50 years. It’s hard for me even to figure out how far in the future I wanted to be looking. Yeah, I don’t know that I like doing it.

Dhein: You have a few different locations in this book, but Spokane is one of them. Spokane is featured in “Fire Season,” as well. Can you talk to me about what it’s like to write about a place that is so complicatedly loved by its citizens?

Krow: I like to write about Spokane for just like the very dumb reasons that I live here. I’ve been here for, at this point, most of my adult life. I moved here when I was 26. I’ve been here as a grown up for longer than any other place. So, it is just like, “Well, I’m here, let’s write about this.”

But also, yeah, like Spokane is, it’s weird, but it’s also like really just like a normal city in a lot of ways, and it is the people who live here do seem to have this feeling about it. It doesn’t line up with any place else I’ve ever lived. It’s like it’s begrudgingly beloved or like lovingly despised. I don’t know. And, it makes it a really fun location to write about. And, you know, I think that Jess Walter does better than any of us the service of portraying Spokane on the page, and I don’t know that I can hope to live up to what he’s done for Spokane, but I wanted to try in this collection to capture some of those gradients of Spokane, the different vibes that it gives off often and then also to imagine what it would be like if parts of it did change radically. I hope I did it justice. I don’t know.

Dhein: Can you talk about how you have that muscle of being able to jolt the writing with so much humor when it is tackling these super serious topics?

Krow: I think that’s what keeps my own energy going oftentimes when things – ‘cause I do like darkness in stories – but yeah, humor is what will help me with the momentum. Humor is just such a sustaining force for me just as a person. I grew up in a family with parents who thought that they were very funny people and so like, I felt as a kid, it’s one of the best things you can be is to be funny and to make your family laugh. I’ve definitely carried that with me as a grown-up. My favorite friends are just the people who I can just laugh hysterically about sometimes dark or messed up things with. And so I definitely like that. I like it when I encounter it in other people’s fiction and I want it in my own.

Dhein: What books do you feel like “Sinkhole” is in conversation with?

Krow: So I already mentioned Jenny Offill’s “Weather” is definitely an influence to me. There’s a short story collection that came out a couple of years ago that I absolutely loved called “Fruiting Bodies” by the author Kathryn Harlan that has a lot of very similar themes, like low-key climate anxiety, strange things happening with nature and then moments that feel like sort of larger blown up. “The Overstory” is a book that I have a very fraught relationship with, and that I’ve never decided very much if I like it or not, but it was certainly influential to “Sinkhole,” particularly in thinking about activism and what role activists ultimately play for us in climate-related work. And Barbara Kingsolver’s “Flight Behavior,” particularly my story about the butterflies. She’s such a different writer than I am, but I was so captivated by the images from that book of the monarchs like totally descending and taking over in a place where they were not expected in the slightest.

Dhein: “Nicholas the Bunny” is the only story told from male perspective. Can you talk to me about the importance to you of telling stories from women’s perspective?

Krow: When I was first conceiving of the book, when my agent and I sold it to Viking, we sold it half-finished along with “Fire Season.” So, it was really more of an idea of a story collection than a collection itself. The way that I pitched it at the time was magical realism stories of women in positions of power and deficits of power, joking with friends that that’s the book that I sold, but the book I was actually writing was women with anxiety. I wanted to retain that initial spirit of these are the stories of women and what it’s ultimately become is how do women live with change, environmental change in this instance. So, I did want it to be women’s voices. But also it’s like, I’ll be honest, it’s easier for me to write from a female point of view. I don’t do it exclusively; “Fire Season” has two male perspectives. I don’t feel like I write men poorly or even don’t do justice to them, but I did want this to be a book of women characters.

if you go Leyna Krow What: Northwest Passages event featuring Leyna Krow talking about her new book “Sinkhole and Other Inexplicable Voids with Spokesman-Review reporter Alexandra Duggan. When: 7 p.m. Feb. 4 Where: The Spokesman-Review Chronicle Pavilion, 999 W. Riverside Ave. Admission: $10 Meet & Greet Book Bundle: $35, includes book, drink token, reception before event Info: spokesman.com/northwest-passages/events/