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Interview w/ Lenya Krow - The Bookends Review
Leyna Krow has an MFA from Eastern Washington University. Her work has appeared in Santa Monica Review, Sou’wester, Ninth Letter, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. Her first collection, I’m Fine but You Appear to Be Sinking, was published earlier this year by Featherproof Books. The stories in I’m Fine but You Appear to Be Sinking veer back and forth between ones that seem pretty rooted in the real world and ones that are less plausible, at least for the present moment. Do you think of your work as straddling genres? Is genre a valuable concept for your collection? What is accomplished, in your view, by juxtaposing these different modes in a single collection? I’d call the genre of the collection “domestic fabulism.” Each story has people who are either dealing with a very strange problem in a very normal environment, or the opposite. So it’s this blending of realism with the bizarre. I’m a big fan of magical realism, but I know my writing isn’t quite that. It’s not so much magical as just slightly otherworldly. Things are always familiar, but also always a little off. It’s just that strict realism isn’t all that interesting to me as a writer (though continue...
Jordan Blum