Contributor Spotlight: Karen Marron

Karen Marron’s hybrid piece “Letting Go” is part of Issue 78 of Bellingham Review. Subscribe or purchase a single issue through our Submittable page here. 

What would you like to share with our readers about the work you contributed to the Bellingham Review?

After the events recounted in my piece (in which my infant daughter burned her hand on a radiator), the plastic surgeon who took care of my daughter appeared in one of my dreams and asked me, “What did you do in the army? You look like you were tough, like you did something tough. You look very strong.” Dream-plastic-surgeon was off-base about my military prowess (I did serve in the army, but my service mainly consisted of sitting in front of a computer and purchasing large quantities of snacks from the canteen), but that dream led me to realize that something about my interaction with the plastic surgeon had affected me deeply, and I went on to explore that.

Tell us about your writing life.

I’ve been writing since I was a kid—my first publication was in Highlights for Children. I’ve kept at it because it’s the only work that really brings me joy (though those moments can be few and far between). I think most of my work is inspired by random threads of words that I hear and images that stick in my mind and won’t let go, and I follow those threads to find out why they’ve stuck.

Which non-writing aspects of your life most influence your writing?

My work as a creative nonfiction editor for The Ilanot Review has had a strong influence on my writing. For a while I only wrote fiction and struggled a lot; I felt like I was forcing something that wasn’t coming naturally. Then, because of a staff reshuffling at Ilanot, I ended up editing creative nonfiction. Seeing the submissions that came in really changed how I thought about my own writing and the need to stick to a particular genre. These days most of the pieces I write are a mix of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry.

What writing advice has stayed with you?

1. “Ignore your feelings about what you’re writing while you’re writing it.” (I believe I read this in an author Q&A similar to this one, but I’ve forgotten who said it and I haven’t been able to track it down.)

2. I’ve heard this advice in various forms over the years, but a tweet by Tania Hershman sums it up beautifully: “Don’t let anyone tell you it’s about anything but getting words down on a page in the way you want to get words down on a page. It’s not about who might like it or what someone will call it, or even if you finish it.” It’s taken me many years to realize it, but writing really is the thing that makes writing worthwhile.

What is your favorite book (or essay, poem, short story)? Favorite writers?

For starkly different reasons: Alan Mendelsohn the Boy from Mars, by Daniel Pinkwater; To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf; and The Voyager Record: A Transmission, by Anthony Michael Morena

What are you reading right now?

Solstice to Solstice to Solstice: A Year of Sunrises in Poetry, by Allison Boyd Justus

What project(s) are you working on now, or next?

A flash prose collection about clothes

Anything else our readers might want to know about you?

My flash chapbook, The Best American Short Stories 1998, which features this piece, won the 2018 Gold Line Press fiction chapbook competition and will be published sometime in 2020.

Where can our readers connect with you online?

Twitter: @marronglacee. Also check out www.karenmarron.com; I might actually get around to putting a website there one of these days.

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Featured Image: “a pink day” by Cleoissabelle