Leyna Krow in conversation with Alex Davis-Lawrence

Leyna Krow is the author of the novel Fire Season, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the short story collection I’m Fine, But You Appear to Be Sinking, which was a Believer Book Award finalist. Her story, “Sinkhole” was published in Moss: Volume Two in 2017, and is now the title of a new story collection forthcoming in January 2025, Sinkhole, and Other Inexplicable Voids. Krow lives in Spokane with her husband and two children. The following interview took place in the fall of 2024.

I recently had the pleasure of reading your upcoming short story collection, Sinkhole and Other Inexplicable Voids, as well as revisiting your first novel, Fire Season. What really jumped out to me about the Sinkhole collection was how connected all the pieces feel. Even though they span different genres and time periods, it feels like you keep returning to some of the same thematic questions, and of course to the same geographic setting—Spokane and the inland Northwest.

Specifically, I noticed that you’re often exploring the nature of change—including especially societal change and climate change—and how those forces are both bigger and smaller than (or sometimes orthogonal to) personal change. Your characters often feel at once powerless and powerful in the face of it all. I’m curious how you see these themes in your work, and if you think there’s something about Spokane that has brought them to the fore for you.

You’ve definitely hit the nail on the head. I wanted the collection to circle around this notion of, “how do we live through changing times, and how can we be good to the people in our lives when we’re on unbalanced territory?” And a lot of that has to do with climate change, which is a topic that really came to center stage for me while writing. I didn’t want the whole book to be about climate change, because that feels overwhelming and also would mean doing the same thing over and over. So instead, I brought together these different pieces that all pose the question: “something is changing—how do we continue on?” And I think it very much is a Spokane and Northwest book. Spokane is where I live, it’s where I’ve lived for the past fourteen years, and so the stories that are most grounded in place are definitely the Spokane stories, for the simple reason that this is where I’m busy being a person, thinking about how I myself will live through a changing world, and how my kids are going to.

I do need to credit my editor at Viking, Allison Lorentzen. The first draft of this collection was much less interconnected than what you read—the stories were a little bit less focused on climate, and they also didn’t all clearly take place in the Northwest. And she said, “this feels like it wants to be a place-based collection, but it’s not there yet. It feels like these stories want to be linked, but they’re not.” So I went back and wrote the linked stories, and all of those are set in the Northwest. I’m really grateful for her direction in helping me see what she felt was already there, but maybe wasn’t quite there yet.

In many of the stories, I noticed a particular relationship to change, in which your characters are aware of significant changes happening around them—changes which permeate their lives, and shape them—but they often just kind of ignore it. I see this, for instance, in stories like “Outburst,” “A Plan to Save Us All,” the title story, “Sinkhole” (which appeared in Moss: Volume Two), and the story we’ve featured in the current volume of Moss, “The Unmatched Joy of Killing Something Beautiful”—as well as in your novel, Fire Season. “A Plan to Save Us All” is one of my favorite stories in the new collection, partly because it captures something essential about why humanity has largely failed to deal with some of the big existential threats around us, which is the feeling that any one individual has a limited impact—and as a result, we can’t really help but be sucked into living in the now. Or that change is inevitable and bigger than us, so maybe what makes sense on an individual level is just doing our best with what’s right in front of us. I was also reminded a few times of Moss contributing editor Sharma

Shields’s wonderful book The Cassandra, and of course the story of Cassandra in Greek mythology—which you also draw from in Fire Season.





What I hope the stories reflect is the way people are. Yeah, we’re aware of climate change, we’re aware that this problem is here and it’s now, but it takes a lot to jar us out of living our lives—and I’m not even sure we all should stop living our lives, you know? It’s not totally clear what the responsibility of individual people is at this point. Even if we say, “this is what everybody needs to do,” how are you going to change? People live their lives until they absolutely can’t. So even in those stories where somebody’s literally screaming, “something bad is gonna happen,” people will say, “yeah, but I’ve got to get to the grocery store, and then I’ve got to go feed my kids dinner,” you know? You can’t usurp those concerns. There’s something funny about that, a little bit… like, the narrowness of human experience. We have such vast capacities as people, we’ve created so much as human beings, but in our individual experience it’s really hard for us to look outside of our day-to-day responsibilities, our wants and needs.

You mentioned Sharma’s book, The Cassandra. Sharma’s a friend of mine, and a tremendous influence on my writing, and I love that book. I think about that character a lot—somebody who has this knowledge but is totally ignored. People don’t want to hear it. I’m drawn over and over to characters who are like that, and the different ways that situation plays out, both in fiction and in real life as well. It’s always sort of both fun and then also not fun to spin that into fiction. “A Plan to Save Us All” is one of my favorite stories in the collection as well because I feel it’s one of the most playful—I read it and I still giggle about stuff, and I’ve read it a thousand times. There’s fun to be had in people’s limitations.





I’m reminded of the moment in Fire Season when the main character, or the person I perceive as the main character, Roslyn—there are several main characters—realizes that “maybe the point of seeing the future isn’t to change it, but to know it, so you can do something after.” And one thing this called to mind for me—which obviously was true with the Spokane fire, and how Spokane was rebuilt after, but also is true of forest fires, of fires in nature generally—is that even though they are deeply destructive, that destruction is in a way necessary for the environment to grow and thrive. In cleaning out the old, it creates this room for new growth. Which is a reality of nature, but also something that we as humans want to resist. And I notice that a lot of your ‘happiest’ characters—at least, the ones who kind of have the best outcomes—are often the ones who are ready to embrace change, to go through the fire and come out different, rather than digging in their heels.





I’m really drawn to the notion of resiliency. It’s something I want in my own life, and it’s absolutely something I want for my kids, so I think maybe that’s coming through in my characters. I think, too, that in adult fiction the closest we can get to a happy ending sometimes is a resilient ending, because adult readers of literary fiction don’t want things wrapped up in a neat little bow, that’s not satisfying for us. Some things have to fall away and be unrepairable. But if we can have a character who we know is going to be okay, even though unrepairable things have happened, that might be the closest we get to an ending that feels “happy.”





I love that way of seeing it. I’m also glad that you mentioned parenthood, because that’s another theme I felt strongly in the new collection, Sinkhole. There’s a way in which parenthood is one of these thresholds—and I say this as somebody who has a 15-month old, my first child—it’s this change that you undergo that is destructive, in a sense. To become a parent is to lose some part of your old self. You’re crossing through this portal that you can’t uncross. But it’s also the ultimate act of growth, of continuance, moving forward. You’re becoming something new, a mother, a father, entering a stage of life you can’t really understand until you’re on the other side—which then you take to the extreme in “The Octopus Finds Love At Home,” the story about the octopus in love who has to choose between literal death, which is the fate of their species if they have offspring, or staying together as a couple. And it’s a lovely moment when they choose to stay in that suspended state a little longer, but you can always feel the inevitability there. So, I’m curious: how has parenthood, and your experience with parenthood, influenced your work?





This is absolutely my parenthood, or early parenthood, story collection. I knew as I was writing it that motherhood would be a huge part of this book, but once I was done with it, I also saw that this is really the book of my thirties. My first collection, I’m Fine But You Appear To Be Sinking was the book of my twenties, and it’s kind of about loneliness, and people trying to find themselves, and outsiders, and then this book is very much about how to be in a family, and particularly, how to be a mother. And I think it’s just because of the time of life when I was writing these stories. That’s what happened. I got married, and we were joined by two kids, and like you said, it consumes you, it makes you a different person. So all of my experiences are filtered right now through that. Even when I think about other aspects of my life—being a writer, being a teacher, my relationship to my own parents, my relationship to my husband, to my friends, all of it is filtered through the experience of parenthood. It’s what that book is because that’s where I’m at, you know.





To continue that thread of personal history a little bit, I’m curious how long you’ve lived in Spokane? What drew you there? And how has it changed since you first arrived?





I’m originally from Southern California, and I’ve been in Spokane since 2010—so fourteen years. I’d been living in Seattle prior to that, and then I came over here for graduate school at Eastern Washington University, with the intention that I’d be here for two years then go back, but I met my husband, and stayed. And I really like it. It’s a wonderful place to raise a family, be an artist, be a teacher—I teach at EWU in the same program that I got my master’s degree from.

The city has definitely changed since I’ve been here. It’s gotten much “cooler.” I think many people on the west side of the state have seen Spokane as sort of rough, and dangerous, and uncultured. And it was never those things, but it definitely used to be a smaller city, with less going on. It’s grown so much, even since the first few years I was here—its downtown is much more vibrant, there’s so much more culture here. But it’s still a pretty small city, and once you get outside of the city, it very quickly becomes forest, and rural, and so it feels like the city is almost an urban oasis in a vast expanse of wild space. It gives it an interesting vibe, and it’s an interesting place to write about too, because it’s a lot of things all at once.





I’m curious, what type of research goes into your work—whether historical, geographic, or scientific? In Fire Season, there’s a lot of real history mixed in, particularly related to the Spokane fire, and all of your short stories in the new collection are very geographically specific, often directly engaging with the unique geology and biology of a place. How does that kind of research play a role in your writing process?





Fire Season was my first attempt at doing long-form historical fiction. But it was exhausting, and made me maybe never want to do historical fiction again (laughs). Because even with fictional work, you still want the historical underpinning and the feel of the time to be right. And that took a lot of work. I feel like I’m still recovering from it.

Years ago, Sharma Shields gave me this great way of describing this—she said, “it’s not science fiction, it’s fiction science,” meaning the use of real science in fiction, as a vehicle to tell the story I want to tell, playing with ideas of real contemporary science but in this fractured way. I love that, and this is very much what’s happening in the Sinkhole collection. “Outburst” was the story that I did the most research for, because it’s a pretty big story and the disaster that it portrays is a real thing. What’s described in the story is impossible, but I wanted all the stuff around it to be accurate. I didn’t really know anything about mountain glaciers, so I did do quite a bit of research, quite a bit of reading about lahars and about Mount Rainier, and I even called a couple of glaciologists to interview them, which was tremendously helpful. I don’t usually do that level of scientific research. A lot of the stories, the fiction science is me coming up with an idea, thinking “I bet this is right,” then Googling to see if I’m correct, and patching things together from there. There’s always this give and take between how much you think readers need to know and how much of the boring scientific facts they’re going to stomach, but sometimes it’s useful just to know things for myself.





Other than this type of research, what is your process when you’re writing these stories? How does the story build in you? What convinces you to take the germ of an idea and run with it?





I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t have a firm answer, because I feel like it changes all of the time. Sometimes I start with a concept, like with “Outburst”—I knew that I wanted this particular disaster, and I knew that I wanted there to be somebody who was sounding this alarm but wasn’t being listened to, but I didn’t really know anything else around it, and had to construct this situation. Other stories start with the notion of character, someone who’s struggling with something. Or even just a first line… the story that will appear in Moss: Volume Nine, “The Unmatched Joy of Killing Something Beautiful” really started with this image of kids doing homework at a kitchen table, and a grown-up dropping something alive down the garbage disposal (laughs). And I wanted to see where that would go. The start is often different, but at this point I’ve written enough short stories that I feel pretty confident I can map out a functional trajectory for anything—that I can figure out, “here’s what’s going on with these characters, let’s see where we can take this.”





I noticed also that many of the stories in Sinkhole revolve around secrets—shared secrets, unshared secrets—and how they can change a person, or the relationship between people. This was true in Fire Season, too—all the characters are keeping secrets from each other, sometimes good, sometimes bad, but always with an impact. You have this line I love in one of the stories in Sinkhole, “Appendix: Selected Letters From Grandma Jenna”—“I’ve never believed that secrets were all bad, though, obviously. People mistake them for lies. That’s the trouble.” Can you talk about that line a little more, and the role that secrets play in your work?





Yeah, I do love secrets in fiction. They’re just so much fun. They’re this sideways way of withholding information. You can pick and choose… are you going to withhold the information from the reader? Or are you going to withhold the information from another character, and let the reader in? And both ways create intrigue, and desire to read more. If you don’t know something as a reader, you’re intrigued by that, but as a writer, you can only withhold so much before readers get turned off. If you let the reader in on a secret, but this character doesn’t know, don’t we want to hang out and see what’s going to happen? Plus, just as a person, I like the gossip. I like to be in the know. I’m not a terribly good secret keeper myself, but I liked the notion of Jenna holding this ultimately very low-key secret, which is that Nicholas is not her biological son, but that he appeared, and is magical. It has so little bearing on most of the story, but she holds this. She’s going to hold this her entire life and is never going to tell. I love the question: what does a mother decide is crucial for a child?





Another theme I noticed you return to again and again is taking shortcuts—doing things the right way versus the wrong but easier way. This shows up, for example, in “Tara’s UltraboostTM Supplements for Good Health and Good Times,” and in the schemes and choices of the characters in Fire Season, and of course in your new collection’s title story, “Sinkhole,” where jumping into the hole feels like this attractive alternative to the very hard work of naturally or properly changing one’s self.





I like that. I hadn’t necessarily thought of it consciously—but I do just love writing about people who are taking shortcuts. I think it’s because in fiction, particularly short fiction, there’s this formula that we’re taught: what’s the problem your character is dealing with? There’s always got to be a problem, right, but I don’t love a narrative that solves a problem. I’m always looking for the shortcut, so I think my characters do too. Like, “oh yeah, she just gets in the hole,” then we can move this right along. I like schemers, I like people who are not going to go the direction that they should. Because it just creates more problems. You need the story to keep going? Create more problems.





Something else I found myself thinking about, on the topic of secrets, is how they’re so deeply tied to intimacy. If you share a secret, you’re giving somebody power over you, which can be dangerous. In your stories, we sense that acts of love or intimacy, while necessary, can lead to destructive, negative outcomes—or at least complicated outcomes. I thought particularly of “Chet’s Landing Resort and Luxury Cabins,” where there’s this couple who are, at first, joking about killing somebody, and having fun sharing their imagined plans for the murder, until they kind of realize that maybe they’re not on the same page—that maybe this shared fantasy is not as shared as they think, and it’s creating problems.





That was a story that was a lot of different things over the years. It started out as a very quiet story about this couple who are having this simmering relationship problem, and they’ve gone on vacation to see if they can hit the reset button, but it never specified what the issue was. I never felt like that version of the story did enough, so I thought, what if it were the opposite—what if it did way too much. What if they were going to kill somebody together. They’ve made this plan, they’re in on this terrible thing together, but then they’re not in on it together at all.





Great. This has been wonderful, thank you so much. As a final question—I’m curious, with your short story collection coming out soon, what are you working on next? Can you tell us about any upcoming stuff?





I’m not one to give details about work in progress. I’m hoping that my next project will be a novel—it’s in progress—and that’s all I’ll say about it.

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