The document kind of festered on my desktop for months. Then it was published (as a personal essay, which is hilarious) and I still didn’t put it down-a very rare thing for me. Because I knew it wasn’t right for Black Light, I’d set it aside, but I never really put it down. Usually I’m circling and circling with every sentence, getting tight toward some feeling. Kimberly King Parsons: The novel I’m working on now used to be a short story, though it never really wanted to be. So, the first question I have is how do you know what’s a story and what’s a novel? What might be similar about the two forms and how do they differ? And, do you prefer one or the other?

Guernica: Here we have the occasion of this excellent debut, Black Light, a collection of stories, and I know you’re working on a novel.

We discussed her attraction to “hot, strange novels,” creativity, motherhood, and feeding her children lots of chicken nuggets so she could finish this book. I wanted to talk to Parsons about the humor in these stories, and the way her characters’ anxiety is reflected in her fractured narratives. “It’s fun now,” she says, “but it’s gonna get so bad.”īlack Light was recently longlisted for the National Book Award, and Nathan Deuel at the Los Angeles Times says, “Parsons is an exhilarating, enchanting, charming, and irresistible new voice…Occasionally a debut collection lands with such a wet, happy thud that you immediately start imagining the rest of the writer’s long career.” Born and raised in Texas, Parsons is at work on a novel in Portland, Oregon, where she now lives. Jill revels in the seedy experience and their bad decisions.

In “Starlite,” the final story in the collection, co-workers Jill and Rick skip work to snort drugs in a motel room all day. Humor becomes an antidote to dread, but sometimes only quiets the terror into an over-hanging anxiety. Take for example the story “Glow Hunter.” Sara, the narrator, is infatuated with her female friend Bo, a free spirit who “smells like weed and body lotion, some heavy-berry bullshit I’d normally hate.” Sarcasm is Sara’s shield, but it becomes very apparent that she is at Bo’s mercy, keeping not only the way Bo smells, but her birthmarks, scars, and odd turns of phrase “tucked into the hot folds of my brain.” Sara laments, “It’s cruel, really, what Bo can do to me.” Heartbreak and dark comedy are inextricably linked. Parsons’ stories revel in a kind of gallows humor.

They are connected by a furious desire to flee the everyday. The voices in her story collection include queer teens experimenting with psychedelics, a man in a rage treatment program, young women suffering from anorexia, children compulsively catching insects-a slate of characters caught up in various games with drugs, sex, love, and deprivation. Kimberly King Parsons’ Black Light (Vintage) announces a singular new talent it is bold and lyrical, cutting and comical.

Kimberly king parsons black light