Black Light contains the type of storytelling that resonates somewhere deep, in the well of memory that repudiates nostalgia. Taking us from hot Texas highways to cold family kitchens, from the freedom of pay-by-the-hour motels to the claustrophobia of private school dorms, these stories erupt off the page with a primal howl-sharp-voiced, bitter, and wise. In this debut collection of enormously perceptive and brutally unsentimental short stories, Parsons illuminates the ache of first love, the banality of self-loathing, the scourge of addiction, the myth of marriage, and the magic and inevitable disillusionment of childhood. As a general rule, I guess, a good story collection feels unified somehow even if there isn’t that through line or those recurring characters.With raw, poetic ferocity, Kimberly King Parsons exposes desire’s darkest hollows-those hidden places where most of us are afraid to look. It almost feels like a novel, this Winesburg, Ohio thing.
Listi: I want to ask a related question about the totality of the collection, because there are short story collections that interlock in a very obvious, explicit way, with recurring characters and storylines. I’ve lived in a lot of different parts of Texas, and I wanted to capture what it means to grow up strange in a strange landscape, to get that regional feel but also feel universal. Texas means different things to different people because it’s such a huge state and there are different parts of it.
Also, to capture Texas but with the complexities of Texas. Parsons: I think that I’m trying to write despicable characters in a way that’s relatable to people or cause people to feel empathy for them and not to shy away from the darker parts of experience. Listi: That brings up the question, what are you trying to do and how do you hope how it lands? Also, the people reviewing them seem to get what I was doing, which you never know if it’s going to land right with people but it has been so far. I never was like, “This is great,” but this is the best that I could do. There is nothing in there that I feel ashamed of or felt rushed. I’ve worked on them for a really long time. Kimberly King Parsons: Some of the stories go back to 2005. She lives with her partner and sons in Portland, OR, where she is completing a novel about Texas, motherhood, and LSD. Her fiction has been published in The Paris Review, Best Small Fictions 2017, Black Warrior Review, No Tokens, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She later moved to New York City, where she earned an MFA in fiction from Columbia University and served as the editor-in-chief of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. Her debut story collection, Black Light, is available now from Vintage.īorn in Lubbock, Texas, Parsons earned a BA in English and an MA in Literary Studies (emphasis on the works of William Faulkner) from the University of Texas at Dallas.
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