Kevin Maloney Interview

[GS-INT-019]

Mar 14, 2025

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Kevin Maloney is the author of Horse Girl Fever, The Red-Headed Pilgrim, and Cult of Loretta. His fiction has appeared in Fence, Little Engines, HAD, Forever Mag, and a number of other journals and anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon, five blocks from his very hot and talented fiancée Ryan-Ashley Anderson.

Your stories seem to have a propulsion to them where you could keep going and going. But what is the feeling you get when you say, "Okay, this is where the story ends." How do you know?

I’m looking for a moment, on a gut-level, where it feels like the narrator has a flash of revelation or an experience of the divine. I never know what it’s going to be when I start writing. I just know that a story doesn’t feel done until the character gets yanked out of the smallness of their day-to-day life and has a chance to see the infinite. It doesn’t mean the character is going to change or even that they’ve grown. Just that they’ve experienced something. Every once in a while, I just sort of stumble into that ending, but most of the time I get the character close and I have to try a few different endings. Then something just… happens. I know it’s good when it surprises me even as I’m writing it. If my ending doesn’t surprise me, it usually isn’t good.

This may require a lengthy answer because it's so open-ended: You seem to dip in and out of the familial aspect or the serious situations in life like love and marriage and fatherhood, almost like you're emphasizing the reality of the situation and then a lot of time go into this absurd place. Eventually, you circle back to some semblance of normal life in your stories. If you can think back to writing the stories in the collection, were you engaging the material and following whatever lead, or were you jumping into whatever came to mind and it naturally came back to the serious life stuff? This is so vague, but I feel like you'll get what I'm saying.

There are a couple exceptions in my collection where I wrote stories totally outside of my life experiences like “The Informant” or “No No,” but in general, I always start with my own life as source material. Sometimes that means writing a scene that takes place inside of the home, in the context of a marriage, with incidents pulled straight from my life. Sometimes it’s more vague and draws inspiration from a time in my life after a divorce or a bad breakup. But reality is always right there. The absurdity comes in because… well, I feel like that kind of stuff happens to me in real life. I think life is so much stranger than the way most people write. Most people keep their writing too safe, too situated in the mundane. But life isn’t mundane. There are so many times I’ve found myself in a situation where I’m like, “This is totally, batshit insane.” So I try to push my characters into those situations. Just pile on the crazy, one thing after another. But my favorite stories are always rooted in real life, in the domesticity of day-to-day living, because that’s where most of life takes place. I want my protagonist to find God on a trip to Home Depot.

I'm an alumnus of Portland, and you're a lifer, if I'm not mistaken. And we both have red hair, you more than me, which has nothing to do with this question. Anyway, even when I travel back to see friends I get so much work done. What is it about the geographical location of Portland, OR that lends itself to so many weird and cool artists and the vibe (which in my opinion has changed significantly in the past 5 years) that that place creates, in your opinion? Do you think it has anything to do with the fact that the city's location on the globe literally makes it impossible to get Vitamin D from the sun?

Ha. I mean, I think that’s definitely part of it. I lived for a while in New England, and even though the winters can be brutal, there’s a beauty to snow. A hopefulness and intimacy. In Portland, it’s mostly just month after month of endless rain. It gets depressing. You either have to get into the outdoors and go skiing on Mt. Hood on the weekends, or you keep yourself busy by making art. It’s part of a survival strategy. I think Portland in particular is a hub for the arts because it’s the cheapest big city on the west coast. It feels like it’s gotten crazy expensive here compared to the 90s and early 2000s, but it’s still half the cost of living in Seattle or San Francisco or L.A. So I think people come here because you can still sort of pare down your expenses to bare minimum and build a life around the arts. But if I was in my early 20s, I don’t think I’d move to Portland now. I’d probably move somewhere like Kansas City, which kind of feels like Portland in the early 2000s. I still love it here, but we’re pricing out the young artists little by little.

When doing a public reading, how do you choose the piece to read, and how do you know you are reading something that will work? And do you think some stories that are meant to be read and not heard?

This is something I think about a lot and I don’t always get it right. Sometimes I think a story is going to kill live, only to discover too late that it doesn’t work. And sometimes I’m on the fence about something and it goes over way better than I could have possibly expected. In general, I think people want to laugh. Humor almost always goes over well. But hopefully there’s some heart in there too. My best readings are ones where I hook people in through humor, and then get unexpectedly vulnerable. That’s how a lot of my favorite writing works in general, and I think it’s a pretty good formula for live events.

This might be a Portland-heavy interview but I want to know. Did you still find most of your writing community online? What do you think that does for writing in the U.S.A as a whole? Since we're not mingling in tight circles in NYC, although that does still happen.

For a long time I really struggled to build community here in the Portland writing scene. Everything kind of happened for me backwards. When I started publishing stories on websites like Hobart and Barrelhouse, and eventually put out my debut novella, Cult of Loretta, people started recognizing me at AWP and I made some incredible writer friends from all across the country. We stayed in touch mostly via Twitter (pre-Elon), and in a handful of group chats. That’s where I found my people. I think the local writing community here in Portland didn’t know what to do with me. In a lot of ways, I think they still don’t. Over time, I’ve made some good writer friends in Portland, but I still feel like an outlier. I’m not sure what that says about the current moment. I’m always weary of online communities, for the ways it allows people to be anonymous, but since I get to see these people at least once a year in real life at AWP, I’m grateful. I think it’s the closest thing we have to a real scene. But if I could time travel and live in the Chelsea Hotel with Bob Dylan just down the hall, I’d do it in a second. Nothing beats real life community.

You've had books come out on some of the coolest presses in the independent publishing circuit. But I'm still at a loss as to why the major publishers don't have a knowledge of the world we're a part of. I met a bookseller for Doubleday once who was confused about what I was talking about when I referenced Two Dollar Radio, which is insane to me. How do we fix this, Kevin? Fix it right now.

Hahaha. I mean--I think a couple things are going on. For one thing, it’s kind of always been this way. Any writer who is making original work and challenging the status quo is always going to have a hard time getting published on the bigger presses because the bigger presses want things they KNOW will sell. And the only way to guarantee sales it to publish books that look and feel similar to other books that have sold well in the past—derivative books. Unoriginal books. This problem isn’t new. But I also think we’re living in an especially fearful, capitalist-minded era. Big houses don’t want to take risks. In the past, I think there was more of a sense that big houses trusted their acquisitions editors to take more risks. But in 2025, I think they want everything to be a known entity. So the greatest writing of our era is mostly coming out on small presses and isn’t finding a larger audience. I’m not trying to romanticize the past—twenty plus years ago, it was primarily white men who had access to big publishing houses. I just wish we could have the best of both worlds. Big presses who published diverse voices and also weren’t risk averse. That would be the dream. Of course, the biggest problem of all is that so few people read. Books, in general, reach so fewer people than music or TV or film. People need to put down their phones and start reading again. If there were a bigger market for literary fiction, there would be bigger publishers selling it.

If you can think back to when you first started writing seriously, where it made that switch to being more than just a hobby, did you have a period where you didn't read the work of your contemporaries as much?

Oh totally. But not on purpose. I wish I had been reading my contemporaries. But, like I said, I always did things backwards. For years, I was mostly reading the classics, and when I tried to write, I did so in a really outdated voice, totally disconnected from me and my life. It wasn’t really until I was in my 30s and found out about writers like Scott McClanahan and Chelsea Martin and Bud Smith and Juliet Escoria that I realized there was this whole other way of writing. It unlocked something for me. But I’m grateful for all those years I labored in a vacuum. I wasn’t getting published, and in a weird way I was finding something unique. Something that most writers weren’t doing, because I was imitating like—Tolstoy and Henry Miller. When people go to writing programs, I think they become much more steeped in what’s happening in the contemporary world, but I had a decade where I was writing like it was 1920. I think it gave me some advantages, and when I finally caught up to the present moment, I wrote in a weird way that people recognized as unique compared to what they were otherwise seeing in contemporary literature.

From what I understand, you have a full-time job. As do most of us. AWP seems like a worthy use of my PTO this year. I like to make a delineation between what is my "job" (the thing that pays my bills) and my "work" (the thing that I build for my own sanity and self-exploration and....). That's really my question. Is it egotistical to be motivated to make art so you have something that outlives you? Or is it more of contributing to something you want to continue?

I mean—it’s hard to think about writing for the future when shit’s so precarious right now. It’s hard to think of the future at all. So I don’t really think about what will outlive me. What I think about is the act of writing itself, the moment of genesis. Engaging with the work. In my experience, if you get too hung up on outcomes, it all falls apart, but if you just deepen your relationship to the work and find meaning in trying to write the best thing you possibly can and push and challenge yourself—there’s just so much joy and meaning in that. I don’t think anything else in life is like that. The people who I know who are really successful artists… not commercially, necessarily, but who are growing as artists and who are deeply engaged in the work are the ones who find jobs that don’t erode their soul. I do freelance web development, and I can usually make it work so that I can still put a lot of energy into being an artist. My fiancée used to be in the corporate world, but it was killing her, so now she does sex work, and it has freed her up to be a successful, productive artist. I think the main thing is finding a way to pay the bills that allows you to dedicate the majority of your energy to the act of making art. Because it’s a 24/7 thing. You can’t just set aside 20 minutes a day to make art. I mean you can… but it’s really hard to see big growth that way. It’s so much better to live in the world of art, to meditate about your novel while you’re walking, to go to the grocery store and get to really be in your body and notice things. I see the whole thing as very spiritual.

AND Do you find being an artist is an occupation or a lifestyle (where your "job" and your "work" are parts of that)?

I’m not sure occupation or lifestyle fully encompass how I see art. It’s more of a religion. Maybe it’s a cult. But I think it has to be your entire thing if you want to be any good.

Gemini Sessions

Discussion about this post