Kim Magowan: The Last Day

Welcome again to the new interview series at 100 Word Story to promote forthcoming and recently published books by our contributors. Authors answer five questions, each in 100 words or fewer. If you’re a contributor with a new book and you’d like to be included in this series, please reach out to us at hundredwordstory [at] gmail.com.

This week, we’re delighted to feature an interview with contributor Kim Magowan about her new story collection The Last Day, which releases from Moon City Press in March as part of their Editors Choice Series. The Last Day is Kim’s fifth book. Her most recent book, Don’t Take This the Wrong Way, is a collection of short stories she and I wrote together collaboratively. Kim has published three stories in 100 Word Story, the most recent of which is “In Case You Missed It.”

 

How does brevity figure into your book?

The Last Day is roughly 55,000 words, and contains 72 stories. So the short answer is: YES. brevity very much figures into this book. My stories keep getting shorter. My first book, Undoing (2018), was roughly 60,000 words and had 28 stories. There was quite a bit of flash fiction in Undoing too, but now flash is my default. You know how runners have a race length that feels most natural? I’ve learned that as a writer, I’m a sprinter.

 

What is one of your favorite sentences in this book?

For some reason, the piece I immediately turned to is my weird essay, “Index of Body Parts.” That essay has a lot of grisly sentences I like. Here’s one: “Teeth are our only visible bones, the skeleton peeking through the window of the mouth.” Here’s another: “The eyeball is the soft plug that corks the head.”

 

Tell us about a habit that played an important role in the writing of this book.

I’m a flaneur. I hate running (that runner metaphor up top is bogus), but I love going on long walks. Moving my body moves my mind. I often work on a story as I walk, sometimes writing notes on my phone. So a lot of these stories germinated on the road, sometimes incorporating images I saw in transit, like the naked guy with the gold baseball cap in the Castro, or a graceful fuchsia that resembled a ballet dancer. The title story opens with my favorite walk, through Golden Gate Park. This collection is a love letter to San Francisco.

 

Who might you have been if you hadn’t become a writer?

When I was 19, in a Sociology class, the professor had us all take the Meyers-Briggs personality test. I’m an INFP (I feel like most of the writers I know are  INFPs). The three professions the test recommended for the Introvert-Intuiting-Feeling-Perceiving personality type were artist, teacher, or therapist. Even at 19 I thought, “Well, that’s accurate.” So, I’m two of those. In another life I’d be a therapist. I say that with a lot of skepticism about whether therapy is actually helpful (the couple of times I’ve tried it, it hasn’t been). Nonetheless, I am endlessly fascinated by people’s minds.

 

If your book were a landscape, what would it be?

It would undulate. It would be land similar to water, land that wanted to be water. I’m picturing silvery, moonscape-y sand flats. The only vegetation visible is succulents (how I love succulents!), aloe and ice plants with spiky purple flowers.