Award Winning Short Story Author Kate Milliken on Writing

When the bambino sleeps, I find time to read Kate Milliken’s prize winning collection of short stories, If I’d KnownYou Were Coming. We met as residents at the Vermont Studio Center in 2007. Since then, she’s been writing, teaching and raising two children. Today she kindly shares some of her experiences as a woman, mother, writer. As a new parent, I was moved by her words. This line in particular struck me, “Kids need to see you trusting other people, so that they may, in turn, learn to trust themselves, to feel confident that they can navigate more than their doting parents.” 

Kate Milliken’s stories are beautiful, from the individual sentences, to the paragraphs to the full stories. Throughout her stories I recognize myself, my fears and other people I’ve known. She ends “Names for a Girl” with “I park in front of a hydrant, outside a bookstore, running in, engine on, to buy this book of names. I am still paging through it, still hoping to find the name for a girl without a story, without a history or a masculine derivation, a name of uncertain etymology. I will have to make something up.” In these fictional, “made up” stories, Kate shares universal, emotional truths.

Kate Milliken’s stories have appeared in Zyzzyva, Fiction, New Orleans Review, and Santa Monica Review, among others. A graduate of the Bennington College Writing Seminars, the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Tin House Summer Writer's Workshop, and several Pushcart Prize nominations, Kate has also written for television and commercial advertising. She currently teaches on behalf of the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and lives in Mill Valley, California, with her family.

Where were you when you learned that you’d won the prize?

We were packing the car for a drive down to Los Angeles. Rushing around, long faced, not thrilled at the 5-7 hour drive ahead-- dependent on the usual kid variables: potty, hunger, general aversion to containment--when my cell phone rang. “Iowa?” Adam, my husband, asked, looking at my phone. We didn’t know a soul in Iowa. But as a writer, a call from Iowa is like a call from New York—you just know it’s your people calling, people who care about the same stuff—words and the way they get strung together—that you do. I didn’t answer. In all honesty, I couldn’t remember if I had submitted to the Iowa Award that year or not. I’d been working on a novel for over two years and my collection of stories had become the older kid in the family, more independent and less worried over. But Jim McCoy, the editor at The University of Iowa Press, left a message asking me to return his call. I remembered then. I had submitted, on the day of the deadline and partially out of frustration, wanting to feel more productive, as I hadn’t worked on my novel that month despite the kids having started a preschool program weeks earlier. I decided that I was a finalist before I called Jim McCoy back, assuming he wanted to see if the manuscript was still available.

On our way out of town, we needed to stop at Adam’s office in Sausalito, so he took the kids up with him so that I could return the call and, you know, hear another human on the other end. When Jim McCoy told me that Julie Orringer had chosen my collection, I’m pretty sure I stopped breathing. Her work has meant a lot to me, so her endorsement made the award that much more special. Yes, I was a blubbering mess when Adam came back down with the kids. I was still on the phone, so he just looked in the car window—knowing he’d be able to see it on my face. He danced in the parking lot. I won’t forget that. Our daughter blushed.

Earlier, Adam had written a note that read, “Hard Drive,” so that he wouldn’t forget to stop at his office to pick up a hard drive for his computer. That note was taped to the dashboard and it stayed there, in front me for the whole 5-7 hour drive down to L.A. I kept having a stupid, giddy inner-dialog with that post it: “Hard Drive.” “No, it’s not! Not at all!” Easiest 5-7 hours ever. For those that have never driven the 5 freeway through the San Joaquin, it can be pretty abysmal—hot, dry, vacant, two different cattle feed lots that stink for miles before you reach them. And now I have nothing but fond memories of that freeway. The collection is set mostly in L.A., so it felt right, finding out then. And that three day trip to visit family turned into a fabulous celebration.

What did your kids say?

Our son was two, so it was just smiles and ice cream to him. But our daughter, at four, was asking a lot of questions about what it meant. She was, I think, made a little nervous by it at first, because we were so excited. But she’s got a competitive spirit, so she quickly caught on to the idea that I’d “won” something. Later I took all this as a chance to show her the stacks of rejection slips I’ve had over the years (STACKS!), so that she could appreciate how much more “the game” is about loving what you do, enjoying the struggle, than it is about winning.

She took my book into school for show and tell last week and then lost it, because it just ain’t that important. I love that.

How long did this book take you to write? 


Nine of the twelve stories I wrote during my graduate writing program at Bennington College. So two years there. But then I rewrote those pieces considerably in the two years afterward. Then, after my daughter was born, I wrote two more. The twelfth story, and the first in the book actually, I wrote after my son was born. So they were spread out over six-seven years. Two stories a year? Yikes. I ought to pick-up the pace! Though along the way several stories were thrown out with the diapers. And as I’ve said, I’ve been focused on a novel for much of the last three years.

How did/do you balance your roles as a woman, mother and writer? 


Big sigh. I don’t know that I do. At least not in any daily way. It’s more of a see-saw…Or…Now I’m picturing a novice tight-roper walker, first time out on that rope with that stick as unsteady as a tuning fork.

I wish I could say that I manage to be the best mother and best writer on the same days, but I don’t. I’ve learned that my writer mind works in cycles. Meaning, I have weeks when I’m mentally fired up and I can crank out a chapter, revise, stay up until midnight messing with it. But when I get up with the kids, I am distracted, my attention divided, staring out windows, hurrying them off to school, their hair somewhat brushed. And then the pendulum swings and there’s a week or more where I’m foggy and every word on the page feels stale, my inner-critic louder than ever. It’s those weeks that I’ve learned to let go of the work and put my energy into mothering, to make up for the other weeks; stocking up on the craft paper, the molding clay, baking muffins with them, getting in longer snuggle sessions, being more silly and letting that serious writer lady take a hike. When I can’t write, when that well is dry, I’m a better mother. So, a see-saw.

I will say, I am not a mother/writer who can write when the kids are present. I’m not sure that’s the best policy. I’ve heard from adults whose mothers wrote and how much they enjoyed seeing their mom curled up with her journal and pen. But I write on a computer and I don’t love them seeing me hunched over that screen. I also don’t want to resent the patter of little feet or the sing-song of their voices and I can’t hear the story when I can hear them, so I’ve had to find ways to separate. It is easier this year, now that my son is in preschool and my daughter in kindergarten, but for almost two years I got up at 5am and wrote until 8am with headphones on, while my husband got up and made breakfast.

Maybe my better mothering and productive writing self overlap more than I’m making it sound, but it took me three years to really see that life could have rhythms on a larger clock, in weeks, versus days—as I can no longer prescribe to a write everyday methodology. And so it simply has to be okay, I have to let myself not write some weeks and, at other times, nod absently at the kid’s questions.

What approaches or resources would you recommend to other parent writers? 


   

Only write flash fiction and/or Haikus.

No, seriously, having kids is a huge adjustment even in the most conventional of circumstances. It’s a balancing act of everyone’s needs. And then, as a writer, you throw in the needs of your, who, what? Characters?! So it seems only fitting that you’ll feel like a crazy person for a stretch there. If you’re someone with a creative urge, you have a perpetual itch that has to be scratched and you’ll be doing yourself and your kids a disservice to not honor that compulsion. It keeps you sane and they, um, need you sane. So don’t fear a babysitter, if you can swing it. But also don’t fear friends and family helping. I did this for a good long stretch. I thought that no one could do for my kids like my husband and I could and therefore we should be the only one doing for them and so I’d just write at 10pm, after the laundry was folded, and really, I’d be fine when the baby woke at 2am, I’d be totally fine when we were all up again at 5am. Fine. No, not fine. Not at all. Kids need to see you trusting other people, so that they may, in turn, learn to trust themselves, to feel confident that they can navigate more than their doting parents.

I had read this, of course, a thousand times in the baby books, but no one ever really says it loud enough. It needs, I think, to be said to a new writer/parent daily. Multiple times. Really loudly. The air mask scenario in the plane going down-put your mask on first—makes complete sense now.

So take the time to honor your creative urge and take help where you can get it. What’s good for you is good for the bambini.

Learn more about Kate, her writing and upcoming readings on her author website.