Interview with Karen Sedaitis, October 2001

Maggie: In many ways, the stories follow the outline of nightmares. Some directly reference nightmares (Contractual Obligations), and others those things we fear most like losing our children; death by snakebite; lost love; abduction; car crash; insanity; emotional paralysis and death. Do you set out to confront these terrifying things in your work?

Karen: Much of our inner lives have the quality of dream, and also of nightmare - instinctive, intuitive, heartfelt, confused, fearful, joyful. In confronting these aspects of life (especially death, ironically.), we come alive, as if quickening the sleepier parts of ourselves. I think these things are things we all eventually come to in our thinking, and experiencing them, or anything we fear, broadens us, teaches us how to be more whole. I suppose that I'm drawn to look at them.

Maggie: Many of your stories take on the landscape of domestic life; love, and in particular, raising young children. As a mother, were/are you worried that your children (and other loved ones) will pick up your book and mistake fiction for fact, taking personally those elements of motherhood including the exhaustion, fear, and feeling of being pulled at (and escape fantasies) which are a feature of a number of your stories?

Karen: Oh yes, definitely, and also of people who don't know me thinking that the stories reflect my reality, or the reality belonging to my intimates.

I'm only really interested in exploring truth in writing, in the sense of what lies underneath our social veneers. There's always an overlapping between my fact and fiction, where an emotion or an experience which interests me may have its roots in the personal. This is because the nature of these stories comes from the personal in people.

In my family, we do a lot of talking, especially about how we're feeling, and it's often not what the others particularly want to hear. but it's certainly real. I think that's a good thing to keep in mind with our intimates.

Maggie: Your style is quite distinctive - sitting just below the surface of your narrators' voices. It has an almost poetic feel. Do you write poetry, or other forms of writing?

Karen: I love poetry. I've written it since adolescence, and read it since childhood. I expect that one day I'll have the courage to publish some, but for

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