Island Rule by Katie M. Flynn
Gallery/Scout Press, 2024
Island Rule is an exciting collection of genre-bending and interconnected stories. What inspired this collection, and how long did it take you to assemble it?
The title is a reference to an ecological theory that suggests that on islands small omnivorous species tend to get bigger while large carnivores tend to get smaller, or in more general terms, predators get smaller and prey get bigger, which is a fun power reversal to explore. For example, in the first story, “Disaster Kids,” the main character is a woman in her forties and a stay-at-home mom whose child is struggling at school. Earlier in her life, she was very center stage as the lead of an all-girl punk group in LA. She was a part of something; she felt seen. Now, she feels entirely alone and invisible, and all that suppressed anger eventually turns her into an actual monster. In the collection, you see a lot of these sorts of reversals.
I wrote some of the stories as individual pieces as much as a decade ago, and I started to see the pieces as belonging to a singular world with rules of its own. For instance, the monster mom of “Disaster Kids” haunts some of the other stories. She leaves mounds of her victims’ bones all over the state of California, and no one knows who’s responsible or what they mean, except of course the reader. The bone mounds function as this sort of long-term threat that the characters of this world must live with, like the way we in the US live with gun violence.
Your earlier novel, The Companions, was told from various perspectives. How and when did you decide that Island Rule would be a linked story collection rather than a novel from different points of view/perspectives?
The Companions began as a series of stories like Island Rule. And again, I was enjoying these elements of the world, in this case, a prolonged pandemic and quarantine not unlike what we’ve experienced with COVID. It’s in this time of tremendous isolation and fear that a tech company launches a new product, the dead are uploaded to machines and returned to the living as a “safe” form of companionship during lockdown. After I finished the first story, “In the Skin,” which appeared in Indiana Review, I found myself wanting to write about another character’s experience in this world, then another. That’s how I tricked myself into writing a novel—I told myself it was just a series of stories. The difference is that though The Companions features eight perspectives, they are all connected to a central character, Lilac, one of the original companions. In Island Rule, I wanted to operate in this world, but I wanted more sprawl, so I thought less about the overarching plot across the stories. It allowed me to focus more on the characters and their individual crises in this strange Golden Rod.
How did you decide upon the order of collection? Did you write the stories in the same order?
These stories have seen many different configurations. In the revision process, some stories were taken out of the book, and I wrote new stories, which filled out the world. The book is organized so that the first and last stories are in direct conversation with one another. So, the mom who becomes a monster narrates the first story, and then the last story is narrated by her daughter thirty years later. And the organization continues like this. The second story is in conversation with the second-to-last story, and so on, until you reach the middle. In the middle, you have a story titled “Mankato” which is narrated by one neighbor, followed by “otaknaM,” which is of course Mankato backwards, and this story is narrated by another neighbor living across the street, like a mirror reflection. The characters orbit one another; some of these orbits are big and take a long time to travel; others are closer and more intimate.
In some stories, you have used first, second, and third-person points of view. How did you decide upon the narrative choices?
I love the first person, living inside a character’s voice that colors the world. A character’s perspective has interesting limitations that can make for a fun playing field. For example, the story “Back Out Baby” is about a couple that tried so hard to have a child, first through IVF, then through adoption, and they got really close, even holding the baby in their arms, but the adoption fell through, and they’re grieving. The story opens in a collective first-person point of view, “we”; then, the story shifts to first-person singular, “I”, where we get the wife’s perspective. It becomes clear that the collective voice is her husband’s voice. He can’t separate himself from their marriage, and it shows in the way he thinks and speaks, unable to operate as an individual, a forever sort of “we.” In the wife’s first section, you see her closing the bathroom door in her husband’s face and taking space while her husband lurks outside, his shadow showing under the door. This shifting perspective felt like the right way to capture the co-dependency in their marriage, which felt dangerous to me. This story has some pretty serious horror vibes.
Other times, I enjoy the distance of third person as in the case of “The Single Friend,” a character who has been type-cast by her friends as the Single Friend, “the one who prefers to be alone.” In this story I wanted the emotional distance of third person, for the readers to sit outside the character’s perspective, inviting them to judge her as her friends do. She goes on a camping trip with some families, and things get dark and complicated, her singledom becoming a problem.
It’s interesting how you play with structure in a couple of your stories, “The King of South Phoenix” and “Pheromones.” How did you make this choice?
With “The King of South Phoenix,” I knew from the beginning that the story would be a series of one-sided messages to the main character’s ex-girlfriend. Because the main character is writing into a void of sorts, his voice is intimate and confessional. The fact that he’s not even sure she’s receiving his messages gives him license to spill his guts.
In the drafting of “Pheromones,” I found myself stuck with the story. After her husband is convicted of a white-collar crime and gone down the coast to a low-security prison, Dee feels shamed right out of her life, evacuating San Francisco to a dilapidated house in the hills outside Sacramento. She home-schools her kids and takes in a tenant, Kandi, who is a spiritual healer. Dee is a character who has lived with incredible privilege, and I found myself struggling to understand her, to empathize with her, so I gave my character a Tarot reading, and that ten-card reading helped me to know my character more deeply, and it also became the structuring device of the story.
Besides playing with form, the fun thing about Tarot is that it’s a way of introducing chance into your writing and letting go of control. Sometimes, a writer needs to do that.
One of the characters in your story “Mankato” says he’s just got to write the movie in his head. Do you, as a writer, follow any procedure or take notes? Tell us about your writing process.
I keep notes in my phone when ideas come to me, sure, but a lot of the time, I’m simply processing in my mind. I’m always on some level working on writing, even if it’s just at the back of my brain, and that process of sort of passively writing is essential. For example, I approached the novel project I’m working on now differently than I have in the past, which is to say I didn’t allow myself to write a word until I had a really deep understanding of the main character and a general idea of where the plot was headed. I actually wrote a pitch for the project before I started drafting the novel itself, something I’ve never done before. It was incredibly useful because it helped me to think through the project on the largest of scales. So, I had a mental map of what the novel was about, the main character and central problem, and where the plot was going. I thought about it for some six months before I sat down to write it. And I talked it through with my friends and fellow writers—that was really useful, too. When I finally sat down to write, the drafting came so fast. I wrote the first draft in about a week’s time, though it’s worth noting this is a lean novel at 220 pages.
Your stories contain animal imagery—rats, mockingbirds. What was your choice behind these animals? Was there any symbolic representation?
In grad school, I studied biogeography, and that interest finds its way into my fiction. In the collection, there are some recurring animals that are markers of change across time. For example, in the third story in the collection, a student writes an essay about how she wants to get rid of the mockingbird outside her window. She goes in a dark direction, thinking about introducing a predator. That story is set during the Obama administration, and mockingbirds are prevalent at this time. In another story set in the near future, you have people stopping to admire the neighborhood mockingbird because it’s such a rare sighting. A bird that was once prevalent enough to be a nuisance in one story set in the recent past is now endangered, almost gone, in the near future.
In “Island Rule,” a biogeography professor teaches a unit on islands, and she uses the rats of Flores as an example of island gigantism, showing the class a picture of a giant rat for dramatic effect. That image haunts the main character of “The Single Friend” some decades later. A hamster plays a surprisingly important role in two of the stories. In “Copulation,” the main character is jealous of her mother’s dog. So, animals can sometimes be stand-ins for the character’s emotions, focal points to place their fear, inadequacy, or loneliness.
You tackle universal themes of loneliness, motherhood, and broken relationships, covering aspects like bullying. Was it something you deliberately thought of?
When something feels pronounced in my own life, I feel compelled to circle it for a while in my writing. For instance, I wrote many of these stories when I was a new mom, so I was very much exploring that role in my own life—and in my writing. I wanted to look at some of the dimensions of motherhood that feel less telegenic, the private side of motherhood. You see this in “Disaster Kids,” of course, where the mom’s rage transforms her into a monster, and in “Pheromones,” in which the mother character isolates herself and her children in the wake of a family shame. I also explore this role from the perspective of the daughter, as in “The Thirteen Films of Victoria Umlat,” where a pregnant woman begins to suspect that her mother is an actress long thought dead. There are so many dimensions to explore, and it can be a wonderfully cathartic experience to poke holes in my own most profound fears.
Loneliness, as you mentioned, is another theme. Missing people. Invisibility. Departures. In “otaknaM” a young girl goes missing; in “The Thirteen Films of Victoria Umlat” a wife and mother disappears on vacation. “Copulation” is set at a remote research facility where grad students start to go missing, and the main character feels so unformed and invisible that her life plan is to steal away on a freight train for a year, figure out who she is. In these stories, I was interested in the emptiness that opens up in the wake of a loss or ending. I wanted to explore these gaps and holes and how people fill them. When I write speculative fiction, I like to start from an intimate and personal space. Adding speculative elements then allows me to amplify. It gives me the emotional detachment to take the story where it needs to go.
In one of your stories, your character writes a story hoping to see it as an adaptation. Do you see Island Rule being a part of an adaptation shortly?
Well, one can dream, right? The cool thing about short stories is that they open the door to a world, and there’s still so much that could be explored after they end. There’s a lot of freedom for someone to adapt, to take the concept and run with it into new terrain. Sure, I would love to see that happen. I enjoy scriptwriting myself. The emphasis on scene and a forward-moving plot is quite useful in my fiction writing.
What do you expect the readers to take away from the book? Is there an intended message?
This book features a series of characters at significant crossroads in their lives. They’re facing an ending—whether that be a breakup, a move, retirement, the end of youth, the disappearance of a friend or neighbor—and with that comes a darkness that shades how they view the world. Of course those dark moments are also turning points; they’re beginnings too, and they can be wildly funny. In life and in writing, I meet the darkest moments with humor, which is, in my opinion, essential during a crisis.
Which authors or books have inspired your writing?
The Vegetarian by Hang Kang is a perfect book, blending literary fiction and horror. I like books that operate in that border region between genres, and I enjoyed blending genre elements into many of the stories in Island Rule, which can take on the feel of a mystery, horror, science fiction, noir, etc.
Are there any more projects in the pipeline?
I have two novels in the pipeline. One is centered on a tech worker and failed novelist who gets hired to be the story architect of the CEO’s memoir. Their work together unlocks some questions about the death of the CEO’s father, who founded the tech company. The second project leans towards a bit of horror. It’s about a woman who flees San Francisco and a monstrous relationship. In Reykjavik, she gets into a new relationship with another man who turns into a monster. Her new friends there, a group of American ex-pats, wonder if she is the reason for this transformation, if she is in fact a carrier of a transmissible darkness that spreads like disease.
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Katie M. Flynn is a writer, editor, and educator based in San Francisco. Her writing has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Tin House, and Tor.com, among other publications. She’s been awarded Colorado Review’s Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction and the Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing. Her first novel, The Companions, came out in March 2020 and opens during a prolonged pandemic where the living can’t go out, but the dead can come in as companions. Her interlinked collection of short stories, Island Rule, is out now from Gallery Books.
Swetha Amit is the author of two chapbooks, Cotton Candy from the Sky and Mango Pickle in Summer. An MFA graduate from the University of San Francisco, her works appear in HAD, Flash Fiction Magazine, Oyez Review, etc. Her writing has received support from Tin House, The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Writer’s Grotto, and the Community of Writers. She was one of the fiction fellows for the Rooted and Written Conference. Her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.