… Karin Kallmaker

1. What’s the time of the day when you feel most like yourself?

After avocado-egg salad toast and enough coffee that my brain is whirring, but not before I get hungry again. This is a small window. Oh, and right before I fall asleep, when my brain is actively thinking about the very next scene I'm going to write. This is also a small window. 

2. What’s your coffee order? 

If I’m traveling in Europe, it's whatever name gets me black coffee with steamed milk. It’s the only time I drink it hot. My wife and I will also order 1 hot chocolate and 1 black coffee and then conspire on how to mix them so I get a 2 parts coffee to 1 part hot chocolate, and she gets the reverse. At home, it’s my own homemade iced coffee brew.

3. Describe yourself in three words?

Fictionographer. Dilly-dallier. Implausible.

4. What do you think of garden gnomes?

Like Clare Ashton, I always thought of them as creepy little fuckers. But John Cleese in Fawlty Towers showed me the true use of their pointy hats, as he tucks a large gnome under his arm and hies off to have a, uh, pointed discussion with a troublesome contractor who had still not delivered on promised renovations. I picture that in my mind, at times, thinking, “Don't make me fetch a garden gnome.”

5. Who’s the most fascinating person you’ve ever met? 

Dorothy Allison (Bastard out of Carolina, et al). She made me think, laugh, and blush in the space of 30 seconds. She’s also a great hugger. 

6. What makes you smile? 

I smile a lot. People being people in good ways. Witty turns of phrase. Sunlight on bright flowers or a still lake. 

7. Do you believe in soulmates?

Yes, and dang it, that bee-yotch Clare Ashton said everything that needed to be said so I have nothing to add. 

8. What is the most obscure thing you are or were into? 

Bobby Sherman. You had to be 13 in 1973 to understand.

9. What makes you cry?

Stories with self-sacrifice, people being people in exceptionally kind ways, the grief of other people. There’s been a great deal of all of that in the past 2 years, so I’ve been sniffly more often than my usual wont.

10. What personality trait gets you most often in trouble?

Before I learned how to keep that voice on the inside, it was my smartassery. Now it’s a compulsive perfectionism that I allow to distract me from the actual work needing doing. Two hours allotted to clean the house? Well then clearly the most important part of that task is purging and organizing the junk drawer for an hour and fifty minutes. 

11.  What is the one thing you wish you could quit?

Feeling helpless about the rampant selfishness and stupidity in my beloved country, coupled with equally rampant indifference to the suffering of others. I know there is little I can do about all of those people, so I'd like to fret less about them and focus more on the lives I can touch. Easier said than done.

12. Who’d play you if Hollywood made a movie about your life?

Melissa McCarthy, in the breakout performance of her career. It would be a short movie, as I’m rather unremarkable, and I think she could nail a scene where I'm sitting at my desk laughing at voices in my head no one else can hear. 

13. In a crowded room, what makes you notice a woman?

A smile, a laugh, and how she’s relating to the people around her.

14. What is the assumption people make often about you but it happens to be completely wrong?

For most of my workplace life, honestly, it was that I was stupid (blond, feminine stereotype). They didn’t think it for long, if I cared enough about their opinion to bother correcting them. (Pro tip: it’s foolish the piss off the person who calculates your paycheck.) See above about garden gnomes and their possible use to make a, um, point.

15. What would be the title of your autobiography? 

The Bearable Lightness of Chocolate.

16. Three women you’d have over for dinner and what would you serve? 

I sometimes envision a dinner party with women who have worked tirelessly to cause other women pain and loss, to whom I would serve herbs from the hemlock family. However, that sort of statement could be construed as a genuine threat. So I will not name them and if anyone has thought of such a woman - there are unfortunately many - I direct you to what I said above about garden gnomes. 

For purely reasons of pleasure, I really would invite Stacy Lynn Miller, Ann Etter, and Diana Princess of Themyscira, and I would serve them all ice cream, whatever flavor or combination might be their favorite. With pie, cookies, cake, whatever. And I wouldn’t stop at three guests, because ice cream is for all who desire it.  Those who make it should be very proud.

17. What is the one memory you’d give anything to relive?

The births of both of my children. I wasn’t the one doing the birthings, so sure, I’d relive them. (My wife might feel quite differently.)

18. What’s in your fridge right now?

Hard-boiled eggs, avocado, spicy dijon mustard, and rye bread. There might be other things, but these are the keys of life. 

19. If you could choose one song to be played every time you enter a room, what song would that be and why? 

Shea Diamond's "I Am America," because it speaks the truth: our queerness, in whatever form it may be, is as American as cowboy hats and baseball. I wrote more about that at the Bella Media Channel because it literally helped me finish my last book. ( https://www.bellamediachannel.com/karin-kallmaker-that-time-when-i-was-saved-by-a-drag-queen/ )

20. Funniest/best/saddest/proudest thing that ever happened to you as a lesfic author?

The most profound thing that has happened to me as a lesfic author, so far, was meeting a woman at a bookstore near Detroit. I was reading from a book in which a crucial secondary character who saves the day has lupus. So I’d done the research about lupus and knew the painful and fatal progression of the disease. While I was reading I noticed a woman in the audience who was immaculately turned out in slacks, jacket, tie, elaborate French cuffs, lovely white hair - just gorgeous. She also had a cane with a silver top that she leaned on as she waited. After the reading, she thanked me for the book, had always been a fan, and then said how much she appreciated seeing herself in a book in a special way - she had lupus.

I began to thank her for her kind words when everything I knew about lupus welled up and so did tears as I gently as possible shook her extended hand. She had endured a great deal of pain getting dressed, sitting in a car, in a chair, then standing in a line to talk to me, and the handshake we shared. An enormous gift, and one I still think I can’t possibly have earned. It was immensely humbling, and I think of her often.

You can find Karin Kallmaker’s latest book - Simply The Best - here: mybook.to/KKSimplyTheBest