How to Find a Writer’s Voice, with Kristen Millares Young

Kristen Millares Young is an author and a journalist. Her brilliant debut novel, Subduction, is just out and was named a staff picked by The Paris Review and was a finalist for two International Latino Book Awards in 2020. Kristen was part of a Pulitzer prize team for The New York Times and is an investigative journalist, essayist, book critic, and novelist. I invited her to speak to us about how to find a writer’s voice and, as good conversations do, the conversation started there and went many more places. Listen in and read along.  

Marion: I’m delighted that you’re here. So this is, as I said, is for writers. And in every episode of QWERTY, I try to drill into one topic, specifically an area of expertise of the writer. And to me, you have many, but one of the ones that really fascinates me after reading a lot of your work is understanding the relationship between distance and voice, I guess, the tension between how do we keep our distance, how close do we get and developing a voice. And I’m really drawn to that in your work, specifically how close do we need to be to a story to achieve the voice we need to ride from.

We see the too close perspective all the time when a memoir writer or an essayist is just too close to a tale to write with any authority. And we certainly know what distance reads like when we read the cool reportage of most daily newspapers. So let’s talk about where you get your sense of distance and voice. You grew up in a home run by Cuban exiles. Can you give us some background, please? And then maybe we’ll talk about where you got this voice of yours.

Kristen: Thank you for this question. It’s one that I obsessed myself into a kind of fever for several years during the writing of this book, because Subduction pivots around the architecture of the unsaid between the two protagonists. And so staying extremely close to each of their voices in the third person was incredibly important because I am hiding the ball from everyone except for the reader. And because of that, the limited view was very important. And it became one of the major constraints that I placed on myself, but also that afforded me the opportunity to explore almost perfunctory and yet necessary distance that Claudia imposes on herself and the world where she’s listening to these stories, but cataloging them from an anthropological point of view as that is her job on the reservation in Neah Bay.

And then Peter, who listens to those very same stories that his mother is telling with a sense of rising emotional incitement, because he realizes through these stories that his mother is continuously schooling him in front of his lover. Growing up in a household run by Cuban exiles, the work that they did to share their culture with me was through the act of storytelling, often stories that were suffused with sorrow and longing for a place that they could never return to. Because even if they did travel back to Cuba, which they did not, my abuela went back one time in the ’70s when her aunt was dying and lost like 15 pounds in two weeks, just was crying.

But I went back myriad times and discovered a very different place than the one that they had described to me. And I realized that the cultural education that I had received was very much conditioned by the socioeconomic status and racial identity of my family who consider themselves to be white. As compared to when I went back to the University of Havana where I studied for a semester while I was an undergraduate at Harvard, when people would ask me if I had a Cuban boyfriend, for example, they would touch their arms and kind of move their finger back and forth a little bit to indicate their asking if he was black.

And so that idea of what it meant to be Cuban being so racially coded and of course that coding also being reinforced by transnational politics, essentially dollar apartheid within the Cuban economy reinforced by the socioeconomic policies in the United States to forbid any kind of trade with Cuba led to white flight essentially from Cuba. And so just the process by which my family was jettisoned from the island was also a volcanic process that changed the racial composition of Havana, which is where they had been living. And I realized that it is very true that you cannot go home again, although I had been taught so often that this was our motherland.

It was not what they had meant for me to take in. So when I came back from Havana, my abuela was horrified by the manners of speech that I had picked up from walking on the streets. I did a lot of research with the sex worker communities of Havana, which ended up being the focus of my undergraduate thesis at Harvard, and the way that I ate, the things that I said, the way that I understood the economy and our complicity in the suppression of the peoples who lived there was not the lesson that I was supposed to have taken. And it fundamentally changed how I saw my family.

It fundamentally changed how I saw my own role in the long arc of becoming that is still being defined between our two nations. And so all of that in kind of oblique ways came into my exploration of Claudia, the protagonist of Subduction, and her struggle with, what I think they called it in Los Angeles Review of Books, racial grief, which is that grappling with a long trajectory toward whiteness that is assimilation to this country.

Marion: Yeah. So, as you said, your novel, Subduction, has these two protagonists and it set on the land of the Makah, indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest. And I read in a piece that you wrote in Lit Hub, you said, “I studied how we tell stories, in particular what we tell ourselves about ourselves when no one else is listening. Upon these narratives, we build our identities.” And so the protagonist goes to this place. And so there’s setting, and then there’s story. In other words, there’s this place that we have that you have your protagonist visit, and then you have this powerful story.

So, let’s talk about how one informs the other, because I still want to get at this voice and this sense of distance. So, let’s talk about going to this place, the Makah land and how it informed that voice of yours.

Kristen: Well, I began researching Makah history, culture and the real unfortunate record of contact within the settler colonial state that we currently live in. And that was all part of a larger and broader almost academic inquiry into the conditions that these characters find themselves in. But the landscape is more than history. These people are not from this place. They are of this place. They have been there for millennia. And so in my repeated trips, this is before I had children and could wander around thinking deep thoughts for, I mean, when I still had acres of time to roll around in …

Marion: That’s a rueful laugh.

Kristen: I know. The struggle is real. I would go out to this place which is on the Northwest tip of the lower 48 and it is a ruggedly beautiful territory and has headlands, it has valleys, there are peaks. It’s surrounded by a national Marine sanctuary. It’s bordered on the West by the Pacific Ocean and to the North by the Strait of Juan de Fuca. And it is really a place that contains within it multitudes. When I spent that time there, I was in an intensely receptive state and it is difficult to walk around with your whole self-exposed to the elements.

There is a sense of sensitivity that our urban societies must numb you to, or you would live in a constant triggered state by the sirens and the hubbub and just suppressive other people. And here on Makah territory, although there are thousands of people who live there, most of them tribal members, there’s a lot of space and the outside world, the sound of the rain, the waves are real elements. You can hear the wind in the trees there. You can hear the eagles whistling. And one of the things that I realized when I was going through the very difficult process of deciding what to take out of the book.

And so I charted Peter and Claudia and their rising and falling emotions and actions on a graph, and I realized that they were basically chasing each other like sign co-sign waves. And that fractal, it finds itself everywhere in song. It finds itself in the ocean. And so I realized that what was happening is that the place itself had imprinted or emerged through the characters in these fractal forms, which I make reference to throughout the book in what I hope are subtle ways.

Marion: Yes. Gorgeous. I love that. I was reading an interview with Elissa Washuta in The Rumpus. She writes that your debut novel is a result of “deep listening to others and to the writer’s own process and of letting something take as long as it takes.” And I see two things in there that I want to talk about. The first of these is listening. How does listening? As you said here, we listened to the whistle of the eagles. We listened to the sound of the water. And that happens right in the first paragraphs of this remarkable book. But how does listening develop and what are we listening for as we do the kind of reporting that we do as writers?

If that’s just simply paying attention, what are we listening for?

Kristen: I have learned over the years to listen for my own bias, which is something, an inquiry that is often truncated during the deadline orientation of journalism, whereby an interview or a conversation is on a clock being recorded and going to be harvested for its nuggets and then the rest discarded. That process is not only does it not reflect the co-ownership of that data, that knowledge building between the person who gives the interview and the person who takes it, but it also provides a kind of power to the listener, which corrupts the listening.

And so …

Marion: Yeah.

Kristen: … When I was trying to listen differently, I was still, and I am still a freelance reporter, but what I first started going out to Neah Bay, I was a staff reporter on daily rolling deadlines, and sometimes had to produce two to three stories a day. And I’ve worked so incredibly hard that that fever of now, now, now came to grip my mind. And it’s not unlike the scattering of our synaptic connections that is happening through the distortion of social media and the engineering processes of those corporations to make of our beings a very thin pool that reflects all advertising.

And so to get beneath that and to find in the process of listening a re-evaluation of what I’m able to perceive or sense took years, and it took sitting around for hours, it took I don’t really like television and interruptions of police reports I find to be almost unbearable even though maybe because I spent so much time in a newsroom where people bandied about deadline references to rape and murder and kidnapping and environmental destruction, and just, you had to kind of inure yourself to it. And on Makah territory, a lot of people keep a scanner on in their house because they’re listening to what’s going on.

It’s one of the ways that they track what’s happening in their small society and often there’s a TV on in the background. And so those kind of tug at the mind within these smaller spaces in trailers and whatnot, and yet it’s in-between or during commentary upon those things that deep wisdoms are revealed. And so learning to listen past the fragmentation of modernity for millennial aged knowledge is a skill that I think we all need to develop, and one which I honed there.

Marion: Gorgeous. I was raised by my first job out of college. I did six years at The New York Times and I sat on the Metropolitan desk next to the police ticker. So I know, I think a lot of the phrases that are used about how they would wish something would happen on deadline, and it could be the death of somebody. It could be anything, but there was this absolute language around that’s all the time we’ve got here, folks. Let’s get it in the paper. So I understand that and I love the fact that you were listening for your own biases. And you also answered the question about the time it takes in that answer.

So let’s talk about these reporting skills. We bring ourselves to the task of looking. So we know that we’ve got to, you say you listen for your own biases and you’re going to stay there for the length of time it takes, but we still bring ourselves to this task of looking. Along with your biases, what are you trying not to bring with you when you go into a reporting experience? What do you actually try make an effort to leave home?

Kristen: Well, there is this impulse, which I think is deeply rooted in our Christianized mentality which is hard to escape in the Western World, that the point of view of the subject is the center of the universe. And that is something that was reinforced by generations of the killings of scientists who were trying to imply otherwise. It still is that righteousness of self-belief and the idea that all compass points orient from within the mind of the speaker are hard to get out of. I like in it sometimes the reorientation that I believe is necessary to unmake the patriarchy of the mind and dismantle their religious poison of white supremacy that has survived for too many centuries now.

That it is necessary to reorient oneself, and it’s almost like looking up at the night sky and looking up and out at the sky and at the stars and realizing that one is looking out. One could be looking down, that there is no true North in the universe. And it’s extremely perturbing you could feel like you could fly off the face of the earth thinking that way, but is this the earth that we want? Can we somehow reorient ourselves to remake the world so that it doesn’t bear all of the scars of the past and perhaps forge something better? And for that, there needs to be a radical reorientation.

Marion: There does. In a word, when I was trained, in a word, I was always taught never to go in with intent. And I think behind that word lives a lot of that language that you just gave us all. And it’s so important to understand, don’t go in with intent, don’t go in saying, this guy’s guilty. I’ve just got to get him on the record. Go in with open curiosity, the purest form you can find, but acknowledge always that you go in with what you know, and you’ve got to leave that aside. The most remarkable stories are where you have that element of pure new knowledge where something doesn’t have a relationship to something you’ve got that stigma on, bias against it.

It’s a fascinating process and I’d like to explore a little bit with you the remarkable New York Times narrative piece, Snowfall, the Avalanche at Tunnel Creek. This is the piece that you were the researcher on. You were the only non-Times staff member on it. It’s a multimedia experience. I’ve put a link in the podcast transcript. And it’s a piece of journalism, it’s a movie, it’s still photographs, it’s a gorgeous piece of writing. You feel like you’re in the avalanche sliding down. You feel like you’ve been buried when you read it, when you look at it.

So doing the research for that piece, what did that do for your reporting skills? What kind of tip after an experience like that? And I’m sure everyone listening to this will go look at the piece and I hope read the piece, but I’d love them to know what you came away with, what new skill or what new sharpening of those skills you related to us about your reporting after something, and it is a wild experience, that piece, ultimately. What did you come away with that was acquired there?

Kristen: Well, one of the things that I learned by watching John Branch go through the process of reporting, I went with him on several reporting trips in Washington State, and he was the author of it and deservedly, I believe won the Pulitzer for it, really echoes what you said about not going in with intent. It would have been very easy to go in and try to find blame for whoever triggered the avalanche, what was the dynamics that led to the decision to take a dangerous path on a day that was overladen already. So to pull back from that kind of accusatory tone and stay in what he called the tick-tock of the day so that the structure of the story is time.

And with the revelations of the passage of time, the dynamics between this group of highly dynamic professional skiers emerges as a story that is understood in the body of the reader, rather than imposed on the scene by the author. And so withholding the news, allowing the revelations to occur naturally gives the piece a power that increases as it moves through its paces.

Marion: Yeah. This story is utterly experienced in the body of the reader. I have never contemplated being part of that kind of motion and life ending, threatening motion until I read this piece. And I love the advice to stay in the tick-tock of the day. That’s something that I think all of us could needlepoint, tattoo, slap on a wall, just remember as we go and report. And I think we lose sight of the fact that we’re reporting when we’re writing memoir. We’re reporting when we’re writing a personal essay. When reporting, when we actually have a notebook in our hand and we’re running down the street to cover a fire, of course, although no one never runs down the street with a notebook anymore, but I did a lot.

And never losing sight of the tick-tock of the day. That’s gorgeous, just beautiful. Are you able to bring those skills, all of that to your own life? You now have kids. You now have this. I read a piece of yours recently that reported right from the front lines of your own life. Are you able to stay in the tick-tock of the day? Is that something you’re able to retain?

Kristen: One of the things that kids teach you is that each minute has many yields. And so I am more acutely … Right.

Marion: Another rueful laugh. Yes. From another mother.

Kristen: Yeah. The compression of time is so real. And so the capacity to move through a quotidian demand on one’s time and find within that five to 15 minutes focus, a kind of focus which attenuates the mind away from those claims that are constantly surrounding us and toward the subject is part of the reason why I was a minute late to sign on because, as I was saying, I became entranced and beguiled by Sappho and her poetry. And I lost …

Marion: …today for this interview…

Kristen: Yeah. And I lost myself and what a deliciousness that is as a member of society who’s expected to be in constant production and service to be anchored in a work and yet also to be moving through time on the wind of another person’s mind. It’s the best. And to the extent that I do use those compressed moments of writing to explore my personal life, I have taken the lyric essay as a form that I continually refer to and rely upon because you can produce one of those paragraphs in a very short period of time and there like emotional pulses. One of the theories that I like to refer to is Leni Zumas, who wrote The Listeners.

And she has a method she calls the constellation method. Pam Houston calls it glimmers. You capture a glimmer and you set it down and then you move on to another glimmer. And of course, kind of the older style of writing novels and understanding linear movements through time required a lot of interstitial, since we’re talking shop, I can call it moving around of furniture. But to move from apex of emotion to apex of emotion is not only possible, but it’s extremely engaging. And when I first started writing Subduction, I had this idea it was going to be like cinema verite.

So everything slows down, the walking pace and the driving pace and the talking pace of that book allows for a focus and observational quality, which is of the place and characteristic of many of the people that I met there. But, the reason the book ended up taking its lyric form is because I realized that once I had kind of created that almost cinematic unfurling of the narrative, that all I truly needed to keep that feeling and then give it to the reader were these moments of emotional intensity. And so I could facet down each of the paragraphs and I called it faceting because I wanted them to feel like jewels.

And so I would take the sentences and read them aloud to myself again and again and again, and I was performing them again and again, and nothing catches you quicker about the quality of a paragraph or sentence than being on stage. You can hear it in the room and the tension in the air. And so that helped me a lot to bring that immediacy to the work that did take years in the making and often the essays themselves. I’m looking back at things that happened years ago, and yet with a sense of emotional immediacy, which is possible through the combination of that de-anchoring of the self from current time and the reorientation toward the past and bringing it into close observational focus that unspools with that immediacy, it’s corporeal, and yet is then faceted down to provide that jewel-like quality that I look for in sentences now.

Marion: Lovely. I love the idea of facets and I love the idea of glimmers. I think the essay is my favorite form to write. I think of them as vertebrae. I think that if you’re writing a full length, book-length memoir, perhaps that’s the spine. But when I take out, pop out one of those little muffins of a bone, those vertebrae and weigh it in my hand, I think of them as being, the essay, I always think of it as a muffin of a bone and sort of weigh it up and down. And The Seattle Review of Books, and I agree with them, refers to you as, they say you’re one of Seattle’s best essayists.

I think you far exceed a regional kind of compliment. You’re included in several collections. There are two coming up next year, if I remember correctly, and I’m so glad. But the range of what you do is fairly amazing. I mean, you freelance from the Pacific Northwest for the Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Times, you’ve written reviews for Bookworld, you’ve investigated Amazon’s plastic packaging and the cannabis industry for the Washington Post. You teach writing in English and Spanish at Port Townsend Writers’ Conference among other places.

I was really fascinated by Investigate West that I read up on, a non-for-profit news studio that you co-founded, that you served as the board chair for, for a long time. And then there’s the novel. So it’s deeply tempting to just simply open this conversation by saying, wow. But I read in one of your, I guess it’s on your website, you say that the trick is to be indefatigable. So the question has to be asked what fuels your indefatigability?

Kristen: That I could give myself the kind of credit that you just gave me. I feel like …

Marion: Woman, sister, don’t we all?

Kristen: I mean, the self-erasure that is embodying a gendered experience of womanhood in the now in the America, particularly of now, means that it’s very hard to stay in firm relationship with one’s past accomplishments. We have a society that is very much what have you done for me tomorrow. And so that feeling of never enoughness is a seed, a poisonous seed planted by capitalism. And I hate to bring that kind of venom into my creative production where I’m trying to free myself from the structures that have not served women for all of history. And yet that feeling of not enough=ness is very powerful in that I don’t really feel the best use of a day that I can have is to work.

I orient myself toward work as a pleasure and as solace and as connection and finding those connections with other thinkers. Because frankly, sometimes, and I’m very lucky to have a wonderful literary community here in Seattle and to have a very supportive husband and even my kids who are very young understand that mommy is a writer and they’re into that. And I’ve been lucky enough to share moments with them, whether onstage or recently KUOW rebroadcast a performance that I gave from Seismic, a collection I just edited of some of Seattle’s leading writers.

And so they can hear that and have it reinforced by society. But so many women writers don’t have that extrinsic external reinforcement to tell them when it’s enough or that they are enough. And so we stay in this fever of absenting ourselves from the joy of relaxing into just being and understanding that by just being, we can produce work that touches the beings of others. And so we often stay in a frenzy of service. And you mentioned that board chairship, I can’t tell you the amount of hours I put into it. It was worth it. I’m glad. But I want to make many books.

And when I look at my creative production and what my expectations are for my creative production, all I think is you have better get going because I’m very grateful for the other people who’ve come before, Toni Morrison is one, Ursula K. Le Guin is another, who show me that it is possible to unshackle oneself from the demands of the pre midlife and to actually flourish in midlife and into old age. And that’s what I want. I want the wisdom of crones. I mean, I have been reading menopausal women deliberately as a way of understanding their leadership, venerating the bodies of knowledge that they have built and trying to free myself from this idea that the vagaries of youth are the most interesting.

To me, that complexity, the layered complexity of aging and what it gives to our knowledge and insight is fuel for inspiration.

Marion: Well, with that attitude, you’re going to be just fine, I promise. The gratitude there for those who have gone before and the desire to pass it along is what we need. I look at it as the huge writers that we’ve all heard of and I always say to the writers that I work with, never be subdued by the idea that you’re a tributary to that big ocean of knowledge, just contribute, just keep contributing. And I’m so grateful for yours. I’m going to put Subduction into the hand of everyone who asks what to read next. Thank you so much, Kristen. Thank you for your work and thank you for coming along for this today.

Kristen: It is such a pleasure, again, I have to say, to be interviewed by someone as erudite as you. Thank you.

Marion: You’re welcome. Subduction is the debut novel and the author asks you buy it from your indie bookstore. See more about her, her journalism, essays and work at kristen m young.com. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. Subscribe wherever podcasts are available. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany New York, reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com and take a class with me. And thanks for listening.

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