Kelly Barnhill was born in Minneapolis, MN. She went to St. Catherine University in St. Paul and double majored in English and theology. “I started college thinking I would be both a doctor and a nun, and four years later, I broke my parents’ hearts by driving away from my graduation in a rusty Oldsmobile with a backpack full of poetry journals and in the company of a young man with a ponytail and obscure intentions. And we went to Florida. Where I worked at a bar. It goes to show that we really never know what sorts of paths our future will take, or what sort of shape our lives will one day occupy. I try to remember this, with my own children.”

Barnhill later earned a master’s in education at Portland State University and through the course of her life, worked various jobs, from park ranger to church guitar player and more. But she ultimately went back to Minnesota. “My husband and I returned to Minneapolis to start our family. We sold our house in Portland, packed up the utility van we bought at a city auction (it even had yellow lights on top—God, we loved that car!), and brought our dog and baby to the ice and snow.”

Kelly Barnhill’s debut novel was middle grade The Mostly True Story of Jack (Little, Brown 2011), followed by Andre Norton Nebula Award finalist, Iron Hearted Violet (Little, Brown 2012) and then The Witch’s Boy (Algonquin Young Readers 2014). In 2014 she also published novella Mrs. Sorensen and the Sasquatch with Tor.com and in 2015 she published novella The Unlicensed Magician with PS Publishing, which won a World Fantasy Award. Going back to novels: The Girl Who Drank the Moon (Algonquin Young Readers 2016) was also a Norton finalist, as well as a Locus Award finalist, and won the Newbery Medal. In 2018 Algonquin published her collection Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories. Novel The Ogress and the Orphans (Algonquin Young Readers 2022) was on the Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2022 list and was a National Book Award finalist.

Barnhill’s most recent novel happens to be her first novel for adults, When Women Were Dragons: “A rollicking feminist tale set in 1950s America where thousands of women have spontaneously transformed into dragons . . . ” It was published by Hot Key Books in the UK and Doubleday in the US. Dragons landed on several Best Books of the Year lists and was a Dragon Award Finalist for Best Alternate History. Her upcoming work is novella The Crane Husband, due in February 2023 from Tordotcom publishing.

Besides these, “She also teaches, freelances, volunteers, runs, canoes, camps, gardens (though badly), and hikes into the wilderness for days and days. She also bakes pie. It’s a pretty good life, actually.”

What were the genre works you loved when you were first getting into genre, and do they still hold up?

This is a hard question for me to answer because I honestly can’t remember a time when I wasn’t into genre. Or, rather, I don’t remember a time when I didn’t read widely and rather indiscriminately. I never considered myself a fantasy reader or a science fiction reader. I was just a reader. That being said, I certainly do remember being a certain kind of girl in high school in my flowy skirt with so many conflicting patterns it made you dizzy just looking at it, and my chunky sweater, and my Doc Martins, and carrying around my prerequisite copy of The Mists of Avalon and being into that book in a way I had never been into a book before.

Now that’s a book that absolutely has not held up, and should not hold up, and it fascinates me how the problematic-ness of the author has absolutely bled into the choices she made in the text, and yet I missed it then at my first read, and missed it later in subsequent reads in my early twenties. Was it groupthink (or in this case, groupread) that caused me to be occluded in this way? Or maybe we just put our own desires for what we want from a story into the story, regardless of what is actually in the text.

As for the authors that do hold up, there are two authors that were incredibly important to me as I started coming into my own as a reader and thinker and writer—Octavia E. Butler and Ray Bradbury. Both ahead of their time, and both are authors I return to, again and again, as I continually lose my way in my own work and have to, like a salmon, return to the place of my making, as it were.

Are there authors or works that you see as inspirations for your own work, or that you see as influential in important ways?

I stopped writing for a long time in my youth. Or, I stopped writing with any seriousness or dedication during my twenties. I had other things on my mind—specifically, being young and impatient and curious. I moved to Florida and then back to Minnesota and then to Washington and then to Oregon. I taught school and delivered phone books and worked for the park service and got trained in wildland firefighting and search and rescue and worked at a bar and a carpentry shop and nearly died of boredom working in an office. I fell in love and got married and had three children and then woke up and I was thirty years old, wrestling three car seats into a minivan.

I had a strange experience one day, reading Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, a book that is etched on the curve of my heart. I held a baby in one arm and that book in the other and read it over and over again, four or five times in a row. I’m not sure what I was looking for or why I clung to that book with such intensity and focus. She is a different kind of writer than I am, and no one would ever categorize my work as related to hers in any way. And yet. After spending weeks thinking obsessively about Father Damien—and Agnes DeWitt—and the artful way in which their story unfolds, I woke up one morning before the children were awake and for the first time in years sat down at my desk and wrote a short story about a girl who walks to the edge of a lake and transforms into a fish. I never published it—I didn’t publish anything for a good long time—but it wouldn’t have existed without Ms. Erdrich in my head, and probably none of the other pieces would either. Does that count as an influence? It seems like it does.

Is genre fiction important? Does it do something or function in some way that is different from literature without fantastic or science fictional elements?

I sometimes feel allergic to categories, and I don’t always feel comfortable calling myself a writer of any particular kind of literature. Am I a children’s author? Sometimes. A fantasy author? I guess. A poet? Sure. An alt-history author? Why not. I think largely I don’t like the notion of rigidity in reading or writing or even how books are shelved because I think it makes people wrongly think that story has rules or conventions or lines that must be colored one way on one side and another way at the edge of the border, otherwise it isn’t “right,” somehow. I reject any limitations on Story, as Story is limitless.

That being said, my imagination and inclinations and tastes do tend toward the Fantastic. I’m not alone in this. Ursula K. Le Guin remarked again and again that the notion of “realistic fiction” is a particularly modern construction in human storytelling, and thus comprises a thin minority in the infinite library cataloging every single story ever told. (I am certain that this place exists, by the way. It doesn’t matter that none of us have ever been there. A place doesn’t have to be observed in order to exist.) Sometimes we have to tell stories about the world as it isn’t in order to understand the world as it is.

You’ve done a lot of creative writing teaching. Do you have advice for writers who are starting to teach, run workshops, or similar? Or perhaps things you wish you’d known when you started out that you figured out later?

Take breaks. Take your time. Be kind to yourself. Be gentle with your work. If you’re not having fun then your reader won’t either, so don’t force it. Take walks. Read books. Be willing to write a lot of dumb shit because ninety percent of what we put to the page is really just blisteringly dumb. Or at least this is true for me. And that’s okay. Mostly, though, I spent a lot of time in those early days berating myself on the days when I didn’t write, or berating myself on the days that I did because I should have written more, or worrying about the specter of failure or any number of other pointless worries.

Instead, I should have laid down on the floor and spent an hour thinking about birds. Or reading comic books. Or playing with my kids. Or telling stories the way I did as a child—out loud to a group of younger siblings or cousins or kids I was babysitting, as we walked to the library or to the park or down a well-trod path through a green forest. Writing is hard. You have to feel everything, love everything, and get your heart broken again and again and again. We have to be in a place of such radical empathy that we feel every molecule of our characters’ pain. That’s a lot to take on. So cultivate joy in the meantime. I honestly think this is the only way forward.

When Women Were Dragons is your adult fiction debut, but you’ve been putting out books for a while. Was writing an adult novel at some point inevitable; was it always a goal?

I wrote When Women Were Dragons by accident, so no, writing a novel for grown-ups was never really the goal. I had said for years that I would never write a novel for adults because adults are boring—and I do stand by that. Or at least the second bit. That being said, my short stories were also for grown-ups, so it’s not entirely out of character. Really, though, I think it’s not for us to decide what sort of audience the story requires, and I would never presume to tell any of my books their business.

In Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book of essays Walking on Water, she talks a lot about this concept of artistic obedience. That the author’s job is to be present and helpful to the story itself, to rid ourselves of our agendas and preconceived notions and to simply say yes to the intelligence at the center of the story. When Women Were Dragons is a novel for adults (though I will insist until my dying day that it’s not a novel at all but is rather a memoir—granted a memoir of a person who doesn’t technically exist, but a memoir all the same) because that is what the story required. And I did my best to make that happen.

One of the many things you accomplish in this work is delivering a complex book that is still emotionally resonant. In terms of craft, what’s the key to striking that balance?

I think it’s a matter of staying emotionally vulnerable, to create space in the story for the reader to occupy, and to know that it’s there because I had been standing in that same spot, in that same space, close enough to my characters to hear them breathing. Meditation helps with this, of course—that practice of quiet attentiveness and staying rooted in the moment and keeping the heart wide open.

What were the biggest challenges to writing this book, and how did you deal with those challenges?

Well, the pandemic for starters. I started this book before the pandemic hit, but much of the writing happened at a time when all three kids were home—sent back from college or doing online high school or working remote jobs in their jammie pants in the living room. And I was working from home. And my husband was working from home. And that’s just a lot of heartbeats and worries and very big feelings for one house to hold with no end in sight.

I honestly don’t remember writing most of this book—I was convinced I wasn’t writing at all! But then I woke up one morning and realized it was done, and somehow I had written it in the midst of dishes and endless meal cooking and feelings assuaging and quiet desperation. It was a nice surprise, actually.

What is important or special to you about When Women Were Dragons? What do you want readers to know about it?

I just . . . really loved Alex. I loved her and loved her and loved her. That’s all that really matters to me, at the end of the day.

You have The Crane Husband releasing from Tordotcom publishing. Are there important similarities and differences between this book and When Women Were Dragons?

I mean sure. I think that all books start out with an irritation in our conscious brain, a bit of sand in the old prefrontal cortex, and then become a collaboration between our front brain, which deals in logic and puzzles and language and things making sense, and our mid- and back brain, which both deal with emotion and sense memory and symbol and metaphor. And those collaborations, depending on what other elements we draw into them, can manifest in very different ways.

For both of these stories, I was thinking about abandonment, of the ways in which women are punished for ambition, of the cruel and unexpected ways in which generational trauma follows us and bites at our heels. I was thinking about the ways in which we are failed by our mothers, and fail our mothers, and fail ourselves. And I was thinking about the solidarity of siblings. And from that, two very different stories emerged, both of which come to very different conclusions. What do I think? It doesn’t matter what I think. The only thing that matters is what the story thinks. Do you see?

The Crane Husband features an unnamed narrator. What was the intention or goal for this?

It is very sweet that people think I have intentions or goals with my fiction. I honestly never do. I realized when I finished that I had never named my narrator, and that it was absolutely imperative that I never do. I’m not sure why I knew that, and why I made the story that way without realizing that this was a rule. But I don’t question things like that. I respect the integrity and the intelligence of the story, and I try to work with what unfolds as best I can.

This is a dark, powerful narrative that deals with a lot of difficult topics, including abuse. What was your approach for writing and handling the book’s sensitive material?

Again, my job is to love my characters, to honor their humanity, to shake my head when they make terrible choices, and to hope for the best. I try to be present, to listen, to notice, and to insist that their lives matter and their hearts matter and their futures matter. I try to be in a place of radical empathy, so that my reader is able to be in radical empathy as well.

When we open ourselves up to someone else’s story—when we see as another sees and think as another thinks and know as another knows—we train ourselves to be able to do this in our regular lives as well. We learn that it is possible to be connected through someone else’s humanity, and thus remember that we are more than ourselves. And that’s a good thing.

What do you want people to know about The Crane Husband, what is the heart of this story for you?

Sometimes it’s not about survival—it’s learning how to live with the choices we’re forced to make in order to ensure that survival. It’s not enough for a human person to simply survive. They have to survive the survival as well.

You also write short fiction and have a number of pieces out at notable venues. What do you focus on most when you are writing a short story?

I wrote a whole blog post about this! I love writing short stories so very much, and I don’t do it nearly as often as I should. A novel is an extended experience—it’s the practice of presence and familiarity. When we write novels, we know the land under our feet, we know the shape of the horizon, we know every tree, every rock, every blade of grass. We know the history and future of the place. We know the generations past and the generations to come. We know everything.

A short story, on the other hand, is an experience. It lives on the blade of a knife. A short story, for me, is immediate—the paradox, the change, the payoff, the note of dissonance at the close. It’s much more akin to poetry than to novels, I feel, and I absolutely love them.

For readers unfamiliar with your work, if they were to look at one short story, what would you want it to be, and why?

OH MY GOSH. Great question! No one has ever asked me that before! I think that “The Taxidermist’s Other Wife” from Clarkesworld is a great place to start. And “Thirty-Three Wicked Daughters” which was in F&SF a while back. And probably also “Mrs. Sorenson and the Sasquatch,” which was in Tor.com. Or they can just find my collection, Dreadful Young Ladies, and find others.

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