During the 13 Days of A+, Kayla kicked off the A+ popup discord with a book club discussion about her recently published lesbian horror novelette, Helen House. The transcript of that discussion is below, minus, sadly, the custom :Helen House: and :Haunted Doll: emojis I created for the server.
Nico: Tis just 5 minutes shy of the A+ Read a Fucking Book Club Q&A with our own Managing Editor, @Kayla Kumari and I am delighted to invite @everyone to come join us!
Gina: ahhh hello nico!
Nico: We’ll start off by just getting situated, and then we will formally begin the question-asking.
Is everyone feeling spooky or spooky enough for a Helen House discussion?
hi gina!!!
Gen: Very hyped for this – big fan of Helen House and all of the queer ghost energy
Nico: yesss
Gina: i feel like living in louisiana means that low-key queer spooky is always an available vibe haha
Nico: oh that seems true
Kayla Kumari: Hi folks!! Looking forward to this!
Gina: kayla! thank you for writing this creepy and delightful book and thank you for being here to talk with us!
Kayla Kumari: Also please know that in addition to questions about the book itself I’m totally open to questions just about writing, books, craft, process, anything really! I’m an open book lol
Gen: Yes thank you so much – Helen House fucked with my head in the best way ❤️
Kayla Kumari: So even if you haven’t had a chance to read the book, feel free to ask questions!
Nico: I love that so much, thank you!
Carmen: Hello everyone! Glad to be here!
Riese: Helooooooooo so excited to talk about this hot creepy book
Kayla Kumari: Yayyyyy
Nico: YAY
Okay, so, I generally ask that folks try to stagger their questions so the author has time to keep up, just as a general note.
BUT does anyone want to kick us off with the very first question?
(and kicking off with 2 – 3 is generally totally chill)
Kayla Kumari: I’m a pretty fast typer so don’t worry about overwhelming me 🙂
Nico: THIS IS TRUE
loving the “several people are typing” energy
Carmen: Kayla said 🗣️ I was born in these internet streets
Kayla Kumari: facts
Serena: Kayla, I would love to know about your decision to go with a novelette length! How did you know that was the right length for this particular story, and did you have to resist any pressure to either expand it or compress it to a more common novella or short story length?
Riese: You write so so so beautifully and perfectly and bluntly about grieving a family member, what made you want to center grief thematically in ur book
Nico: y e s
Gen: I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind talking a little bit the “monstering” of queer people in
the horror genre. I was super interested the fact that our narrator is an academic who is looking at questions of queerness, the gothic, and horror within the space of this story. I’ve been writing a lot about the reclaiming of queer monstering for my thesis and would love to hear more of your thoughts
Nico: honestly excited about your thesis
Kayla Kumari (in reply to Serena): It was an ACCIDENT!!! I set out to write a short story about a ghost and a weird house after reading Bag Of Bones by Stephen King. I ended up writing about 10k words which was way too long to be a short story I could actually place in a journal. So I thought I had to choose between significantly shortening it or significantly lengthening it into novel length. OR SO I THOUGHT. Shortly after, I was approached by an editor at Burrow Press who told me about their books, which tend to be works that can’t find traditional homes. And he specifically used the words “short stories that are too long to actually be short stories” and I was like I HAVE EXACTLY THAT. It was perfect!
Gina: i have a question that relates to @Serena’s about form – did you always conceptualize this with the illustrations? if not, when did they come into the process? i loved them – but what prompted the choice to include them in this story? and how does working with an illustrator affect how you understand the piece itself?
Gen: Kira Gondeck-Silvia did an awesome job with the art
Kayla Kumari (in response to Riese): I knew I wanted to write a ghost story, and that automatically means grief. But I also really wanted to write a sister story. So even though there’s this romantic relationship at the center of the story I really wanted a lot of the emotional velocity of the narrative to come from family/sisterhood/etc. “Sister” is a strong part of my identity and I wanted to write about the strange intimacy between sisters who are close but almost like…the absence of it. Because we never get to be with these sisters in the present. It’s all memory. So it’s the absence of that
KaylaKumari (in reply to Gina): I didn’t! Because of my love for film and television and storytelling mediums, I do often think of visuals and images when it comes to my stories, but I’d never considered illustrations. It was my editor’s idea, and as soon as he said it I thought of Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark and was like YEP I’M IN
Kayla Kumari (in response to Gen): She’s so great! She’s a local artist here in Orlando and my girlfriend and I actually own an original painting of hers! It’s of a bunch of peacocks fighting lol
Carmen: I definitely also got Scary Stories To Tell In the Dark vibes, I’m so glad to hear I wasn’t alone haha
Nico: I hope I can ask a question 😄 I have a kind of craft question, which is, are there guiding principles you look to when crafting suspense or horror? There can be so much horror that is truly a let-down, or that does not seem to contain enough depth or enough layering, but as I told you, one of my favorite things about Helen House was what I discovered in the re-read. I guess, besides looking to other authors as influences, are there things you look for in the text as you write or as you revise? I suppose I am wondering about what you’re looking for as you write. Creating suspense intentionally can be so difficult.
Gen: That’s so cool! The art and your story went so well together
Kayla Kumari (in reply to Nico): It’s hard! Pacing is really hard with with horror, and sometimes intentionally trying to craft suspense just feels so forced. I do find a lot of those beats and rhythms in revision. As I’m writing, I try to think of what the characters know and don’t know, because so much of the horror is in the unknown and uncertainty. I try to write the first draft without thinking TOO much about like “is this scary” though. Then when I go back I add in some of those touches if they’re needed. I also just read and watch horror and learn a lot from that!
Kayla Kumari: The process of the illustrations coming together was really cool. She read an early draft of the book and asked really interesting, in-depth questions! It was neat
Nico: I love the idea of focusing on what the characters know and do not know. Thank you.
Joce: How did you decide to end the story where you did? Did you write drafts where it goes slightly longer or did you always plan on ending it semi-ambiguously
Kayla Kumari: The artist was one of the first people to point blank ask me who the narrator was addressing in the book. Because I use that second person/addressing the reader voice. I was surprised! I didn’t think anyone would ask that.
Andy: I don’t know if I’m going to phrase this well, but do you have any thoughts on the inherent queerness of horror?
Kayla Kumari (still in response to Nico): Even though the book definitely shifted in subsequent drafts, the final ending is really really close to the original ending. The only difference is that I ended up slowing it down a bit more. It used to end on kind of a punchier note and in revision I ended up turning it into a slightly drowsier moment, a little more dreamlike and ambiguous and slooooow. That goes back to the idea of pacing in horror being hard. I think I was going for a “jumpscare” when really it needed to be something softer. Soft can still be scary! A swallow rather than a bite, to use the extended mouth metaphors that show up a lot in the book
Nico: honestly, yes, that is so true?
you’ve reminded me of a lot of endings in the…like that really dystopian french cartoon? aeon flux? where the main character dies at the end of each episode? so many of those endings are so haunting.
Kayla Kumari (in response to Andy): HOW MUCH TIME DO YOU HAVE! Haha no seriously, I love this question. It’s something I think about all the time. I could probably write an entire book about it lol so I’ll try to keep this short/focused. But to be completely honest, there’s such a clear line that connects queerness and horror for me personally because I literally did not like horror until I came out. I could not engage with things that scared me when I was closeted. I refused to watch scary movies and claimed to hate them! Then once I came out it was like this switch flipped and I became OBSESSED with horror. It sounds too on-the-nose to be real, but it is haha. Queerness to me was something I felt I couldn’t look at straight on; horror was something I felt like I couldn’t look at straight on. And yet I desired both. Almost like this forbidden love situation, you know? So for me, it feels very personal, very connected.
Nico: i continue to be fascinated by this
whomst else has a question? (entering teacher mode)
Gen: Was your narrator always written as someone deeply self aware? I feel like we often see the grieving figure in horror, but don’t always see the grieving person who holds their grief while seemingly going through therapy
Gina: i’m also really interested in how you were thinking about femininity and domesticity in the story. thinking about things like the creepy dress, the dollhouse, the meet-the-parents setup – would you be able to say more about the relationship between these normative constructs and the horror components of the story, in your thinking?
(sorry for the convolutions! i hope it wasn’t too unclear)
Kayla Kumari (in response to Gen): Yes! I went into it wanting to write a horror protagonist who has been to therapy. And so she’s super self-aware, but just because she’s self-aware and knows a lot about grief doesn’t mean that she’s always RIGHT about herself. She has ingested a lot of narratives about herself, told herself a lot of narratives about herself. There’s almost too MUCH information, too much self-awareness, so it scrambles some of her intuition. But I think sometimes horror protagonists can lack emotional intelligence or otherwise be TOO divorced from their emotions, so I wanted to try something different.
Casey: I’ve never written fiction before, but when I read this story, I realized it is EXACTLY the type of fiction I would want to write if I had the skills and courage. Do you have any general advice for someone looking to dip their toes into fiction after mostly writing creative nonfiction?
Nico: I love this question so much.
Carmen: (I love this question)
Kayla Kumari (in response to Gina): Yes I’m so glad you picked up on some of this! So I was thinking a lot about the whole bringing someone home to meet the parents~ trope and how it’s always an especially layered and complicated experience for queer people. Even when parents ARE accepting, which is the case for Amber’s. They’re totally accepting of Amber’s queerness, so that’s not a conflict in and of itself, but there is this underlying tension of the narrator feeling that she needs to still perform in some way. She wants to prove to them that she can take care of Amber, and I think she probably also has some internalized biases about herself in terms of how driven by sex she is. She’s obsessed with this idea of being a “good girlfriend” and I think even if she doesn’t realize it or name it, her concept of a “good girlfriend” is totally shaped by heteronormative ideas of domesticity, and perhaps that is heightened because of how her otherwise “traditional” family structure was recently exploded by the death of her sister
Gina: this is really lovely – thank you!
Kayla Kumari: Ahhhhh this is like the nicest compliment honestly?! I’m so excited for you to pursue a fiction journey! Honestly, a lot of creative nonfiction craft functions similarly to fiction craft! As far as dipping your toes in, reading a lot of short fiction is something I like to recommend. You can learn so much from short stories. Also I wanna plug my friend Jami Attenberg’s newsletter Craft Talk, which I think is THEEEE best newsletter for writers, especially fiction writers, but really anyone!
Gina: when i think of gothic literature, i generally think of it being very, very cold. the heat was incredible in creating an oppressive atmosphere, and it seems so obvious yet i think this might be the first time i’ve seen it in this genre – could you talk more about that choice?
Kayla Kumari: Oh and read fiction in literary journals too!
Gina: and perhaps related to the question of gothic – socially-conscious gothic is having a ~moment~ right now. did you consume a lot of it for inspiration / finding your space in the conventions as you were writing, or did you try to avoid it? and what are your favorite gothic texts?
Casey: Thank you!! Love Craft Talk 🌟
Kayla Kumari: HOT HORROR! I call it hot horror lol! My girlfriend kinda introduced me to the concept of hot horror when she told me about a horror novel called The Elementals, which is set in a beach town in Alabama. And one of the most iconic hot horror scenes I think of is the beach scene in Jaws — so bright and sunny which is not how you usually think of horror movies, you know? And then there’s my all time favorite miniseries Sharp Objects (as well as the book which I love) and that show is just like…..SWEATY. It’s a sweaty, sweaty horror show. So yes I do think I was intentionally writing Hot Horror, which given the sexual nature of the book has a double meaning lololol
Gen: I think my earlier question might have gotten lost in the flood and relates back to topics of connection between queerness and horror, “I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind talking a little bit the “monstering” of queer people in the horror genre. I was super interested the fact that our narrator is an academic who is looking at questions of queerness, the gothic, and horror within the space of this story. I’ve been writing a lot about the reclaiming of queer monstering for my thesis and would love to hear more of your thoughts”
Kayla Kumari: I didn’t necessarily sit down thinking I was going to write a gothic horror story, but I had indeed been reading some things in that realm leading up to it. I’ve talked about this a few times, but Bag of Bones was definitely percolating in my mind when I wrote this draft, because I’d just read it while in a cabin and was just thinking a lot about haunted spaces, storytelling, grief, etc.
Kayla Kumari: Yes! That new Shudder documentary Queer for Fear touched on the idea of queer monsters/queering monsters/reclaiming monster narratives, etc. And I’m always interested in those kinds of conversations, which is also why I kind of meta-embedded it into the book by making the narrator’s dissertation related to it. There are really obvious lines to be drawn between the treatment of monsters in classic horror stories and the treatment of queer people, but it’s also deeper and more nuanced than that. Monsters are hard to define, don’t fit in boxes, represent difference. And that can be a source of power and joy for queer folks, to create something new that exists outside of the norm. It doesn’t have to be an othering. So it makes sense to me when some queer folks can relate to the monsters in stories.
Nico: I had also wondered about the decision to have a queer character be so complicit in the creation of the horror. And also how you both managed to lull me with her at first, and then make me believe she (the girlfriend) would be a part of the scheme by the end. Is it a question? I think I’m wondering about characterization and characters who are only filtered through the protagonist’s viewpoint and how you thought about that when creating suspense and adding credibility to the horror of it all.
Also if you all have q’s of any kind, craft, writing, what-have-you, Kayla has said she’d love em! So please ask away.
Kayla Kumari: Yes pls feel free to ask questions that aren’t specifically about the book if you have them!
Gen: Would you mind talking a bit about how you’ve built your writing community? I have so admiration for autostraddle, how you support each other, and the incredible work you all produce
🙂: Late to the party—I tried catching up but couldn’t tell if you’d already answered who the narrator was addressing the story to
Kayla Kumari (in response to Nico): Yeah I think it’s kind of open for interpretation what Amber’s motivations are, how complicit she is in her family’s behaviors, whether she’s protecting or using the narrator. I was thinking a lot about dolls and how people perform for others but also are manipulated by others. I think one thing that is for sure is that Amber is sometimes treated as a doll by her parents. So she doesn’t always have a ton of control in life, she has let her parents project a lot onto her because of the loss they’ve experienced
Nico: ok well that is wild
Kayla Kumari (in response to Gen): In my mind, it’s a new therapist
Nico: but wait! that implies she got out
🙂: Oh wow. Looking forward to a reread with all this in mind
Gina: that’s also interesting in light of the way the protagonist explicitly says she’s using amber at times as well.
Carmen: This is so interesting??
Nico: omg yes
Gina: ooh, and amber as fossilized (?) tree sap – something organic and preserved but no longer living and that serves to preserve something else
Nico: this just holds up so well to re-reads
🤯
Gen: My evening plans after this
🙂: Does it? Or would she use her time there for self therapy? Like journaling to a therapist?
Kayla Kumari (in response to Gen asking about building writing community): Some of the first writer friends I ever made I found on tumblr when I was like a teenager! Twitter has been a huge part of building my writing community as well. And yeah I “grew up” as a writer with Autostraddle lol. I’ve been part of Autostraddle for over SEVEN YEARS!!! Wild! I’m also lucky to be in a writer-for-writer relationship lol so it really does feel like so many of the people in my life are writers, and I love that
I also made a lot of writer friends from the Tin House summer workshop and the Lambda Literary fellowship! People who I text every day!
Gen: That’s really great! Grateful for all you and everyone over at autostraddle do
Kayla Kumari (in response to Nico): yep! i think in general the fact that she’s narrating the story means she got out 🙂 i suppose she could be talking to the doll lol
Nico: i just was not thinking like that tbh but YES
Gen: Was trying to describe this book to my cohort and used the word “dollification” at least three times
Nico: which honestly adds to the horror because it makes it maybe less supernatural
Kayla Kumari: everyone is a doll and everyone is someone playing with a doll 😉
Kayla Kumari (in response to Gen): omg love that
🙂: Well now I want to know how.
Kayla Kumari: great theory too, tbh
Kayla Kumari (in response to Gina): you’re the first person to pick up on this. i picked the name amber intentionally
Nico: Amber Award
🙂: With the book and writing in general, how does it feel to have such an intimate part of yourself out there where it may take on entirely different meanings for other folks? Is it a part of writing that you enjoy?
Carmen: Dollification!!
Gina: i think you mentioned writing this in a cabin above – what was it like writing about multiple creepy houses in that kind of environment?
Gina: helen is the perfect name for creepy dead girl, btw.
Kayla Kumari: i def scared myself haha. my gf and i were staying in a pretty remote area in north carolina, and i was reading a lot of scary books and writing scary stories. the thing about me is that i love horror but i also get really truly scared! i’m a scaredy cat but i also crave that sensation lol.
Nico: I love these questions, and also want to open up space for @Kayla Kumari to ask some of her own as we approach the close of this iteration of book club. Often, authors use this time to ask about things they wish they’d gotten feedback on, or, honestly, to ask about the experiences of the folks present for book club. Truly up to you.
Nico: but what do you do when you get scared???
Kayla Kumari: sometimes i will no joke FURTHER SCARE MYSELF. if i watch a movie that’s too scary i’ll watch another one of my favorite scary movies that’s a little more familiar lol
ok i’m supposed to ask questions now (but also if anyone else has any last minute questions, feel free!)
Carmen: Kayla!!
Kayla Kumari: ok how about this
would people be interested in a prequel novelette from amber’s pov but set way before she and the narrator ever meet
just wondering
out of curiosity
Gina: um yes i would like that very much please
Gen: YES
🙂: I had a lot of questions about Amber (like how can you not warn your gf to bring a t-shirt?!) so I would quite enjoy that
Kayla Kumari: I do enjoy it! My girlfriend who is a novelist says this all the time: The book isn’t yours anymore once it’s published. It just isn’t. It belongs to other people now. And I think once you accept that, it’s actually really easy to just let go. I love nothing more than to see people’s interpretations. I wrote a very ambiguous book. People can take it however they like. They can dislike characters and even not like some of the writing choices I made! If I didn’t want people to have opinions I would have just left it as a document on my laptop
Kayla Kumari: Yeah that’s one of those moments where it’s like…was Amber intentionally punishing the narrator by not warning her about the heat or is Amber so used to the heat of the house that she doesn’t even remember to warn someone
🙂: Exactly what i wondered
Carmen: I’ll be thinking “she could’ve been talking to the doll” a lot now
Nico: “if I didn’t want people to have opinions I would have just left it as a document on my laptop” is so true
Kayla Kumari: To add to this a bit, I feel really lucky about my entire publishing experience. I love the micro press route, because there’s way less pressure on me. Of course I’d love to publish work at a big press one day, but also…would I? It comes with soooo much additional pressure and performance etc. I admire the people who do it. I won’t pretend like I don’t have those ambitions. But there’s something to be said of my first book experience and the fact that I literally just like…forgot Goodreads exists vs. obsessing over my ratings and whatnot.
Nico: they seem like they treated you really well
(Burrow)
Gina: i saw you get shouted out on themillions.com on release day, though, and had a little yelp of excitement!
🙂: Speaking of…if you ever want to pitch an AS article where you just ask your gf questions about With Teeth, I’d read that
It seems like you can get some pretty amazing creations when you don’t have to worry about keeping big corporations happy. Like Alice wu movies.
Kayla Kumari: That’s so funny because I remember briefly having a joke idea when With Teeth was coming out where I was going to interview her and only ask questions that I legitimately didn’t know the answers to which would have required some creativity since we had talked about the book a lot while she was writing it. And some of the questions weren’t even going to be about the book lol I was gonna ask “what’s the weirdest story you have about teeth”
Nico: incredible
Gen: would be down for roundtable teeth story content
Gina: i don’t have any last questions – just thanks so much for being here, and for this wonderful little book, kayla – i am now fully plotting how i might write an essay about it / even teach it someday ❤️
🙂: I was going to say questions you hadn’t asked about With Teeth, but I didn’t want to miss out on some you already had. So much talent in one relationship!
Nico: Seriously, thank you everyone for showing up tonight. Thank you Kayla for being so game to answer all our questions tonight. Thank you all for making this a space I love to be in that is somehow also haunted. 👻
Kayla Kumari: Thank you so so much!
Gen: Thank you all! Also soundout to Nico for all their work putting this together
shout out*
Nico: ❤️
Kayla Kumari: Yes thank you everyone!!! This was great!
Nico: Truly a treasure. PRECIOUS AS AMBER.
Kayla Kumari: lololol
Nico: You all are the best!
I believe that this concludes book club, but not the server!! I hope everyone goes forth and has a lot of fun ❤️ Thank you all, and especially, thank you Kayla, again!!
Kayla Kumari: Thanks all! Goodnight!
🙂: Thank you!
ah thank you for posting these transcripts!